Abstract
Client-side Javascript execution environments (browsers) allow anonymous functions and event-based programming concepts such as callbacks. We investigate whether a mutate-and-test approach can be used to optimise web page load time in these environments. First, we characterise a web page load issue in a benchmark web page and derive performance metrics from page load event traces. We parse Javascript source code to an AST and make changes to method calls which appear in a web page load event trace. We present an operator based solely on code deletion and evaluate an existing “community-contributed” performance optimising code transform. By exploring Javascript code changes and exploiting combinations of non-destructive changes, we can optimise page load time by 41% in our benchmark web page.
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Notes
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The version we used was specifically marked as experimental.
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Full web app code: https://github.com/mlaval/optimize-angular-app.
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Acknowledgements
This research is based upon works supported by Science Foundation Ireland under grant 13/IA/1850 and 13/RC/2094 which is co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund through the Southern & Eastern Regional Operational Programme to Lero - the Irish Software Research Centre (www.lero.ie).
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Cody-Kenny, B. et al. (2018). Investigating the Evolvability of Web Page Load Time. In: Sim, K., Kaufmann, P. (eds) Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10784. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77538-8_51
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77538-8_51
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