2018/02/22 by Cody-Kenny, Brendan, Manganiello, Umberto, Farrelly, John +4
#FOS: Computer and information sciences #Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE) #Software Engineering (cs.SE)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1803.01683
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.