Alohamora: Reviving HTTP/2 Push and Preload by Adapting Policies On the Fly

Despite their promise, HTTP/2's server push and preload features have seen minimal adoption. The reason is that the efficacy of a push/preload policy depends on subtle relationships between page content, browser state, device resources, and network conditions-static policies that generalize across environments remain elusive. We present Alohamora, a system that uses Reinforcement Learning to learn (and apply) the appropriate push/preload policy for a given page load based on inputs characterizing the page structure and execution environment. To ensure practical training despite the large number of pages served by a site and the massive space of potential policies to consider for a given page, Alohamora introduces several key innovations: a page clustering strategy that favorably balances push/preload insight extraction with the number of pages required for training, and a faithful page load simulator that can evaluate a policy in several milliseconds (compared to 10s of seconds with a real browser). Experiments across a wide range of pages and mobile environments (emulation and real-world) reveal that Alohamora accelerates page loads by 19-61%, provides 3.6-4× more benefits than recent push/preload systems, and properly adapts to never degrade performance.