HTTP Steady Connections for Robust Web Acceleration

HTTP’s intrinsic request-and-response traffic pattern makes most web servers often idle, leaving a potential to accelerate page loads. We present the notion of HTTP steady connections, which fully utilizes the server’s available network bandwidth during a page load using the promising HTTP/3 server push, transforming the intermittent workload of loading a page into a more steady one. To construct a proper server push policy to achieve this, we separate the structure of a page, which is a relatively static factor, from the page load environments including client and network characteristics, which are generally dynamic and unknown to servers. We formulate a deadline-based sequencing problem using a page load model with dependency graphs and design a feedback-based reprioritization mechanism within HTTP server push to reactively match client progress robustly. Experiments with a prototype and a wide range of real-world pages show that HTTP steady connections significantly improve web page loads compared with state-of-the-art accelerators, even under packet losses and without any prior knowledge of network environments.