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Dissecting Web Latency in Ghana

Authors:

Thomas Pötsch,

Lakshminarayanan SubramanianAuthors Info & Claims

IMC '14: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference

Pages 241 - 248

https://doi.org/10.1145/2663716.2663748

Published: 05 November 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Web access is prohibitively slow in many developing regions despite substantial effort to increase bandwidth and network penetration. In this paper, we explore the fundamental bottlenecks that cause poor web performance from a client's perspective by carefully dissecting webpage load latency contributors in Ghana. Based on our measurements from 2012 to 2014, we find several interesting issues that arise due to the increasing complexity of web pages and number of server redirections required to completely render the assets of a page. We observe that, rather than bandwidth, the primary bottleneck of web performance in Ghana is the lack of good DNS servers and caching infrastructure. The main bottlenecks are: (a) Recursive DNS query resolutions; (b) HTTP redirections; (c) TLS/SSL handshakes. We experiment with a range of well-known end-to-end latency optimizations and find that simple DNS caching, redirection caching, and the use of SPDY can all yield substantial improvements to user-perceived latency.

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Cited By

Naatu FAlon IAmoako GMornah D(2023)Pro-environmental values’ and consumer behavior in base of the pyramid market: GhanaCompetitiveness Review: An International Business Journal10.1108/CR-02-2023-002634:4(807-831)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1108/CR-02-2023-0026
Chaqfeh MHaseeb MHashmi WInshuti PRamesh MVarvello MSubramanian LZaffar FZaki Y(2022)To Block or Not to Block: Accelerating Mobile Web Pages On-The-Fly Through JavaScript ClassificationProceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development10.1145/3572334.3572397(1-12)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3572334.3572397
Tieanklin NJohnson MHeimerl K(2021)Poster: The Low Impact of COVID-19 on Rural Community Network TrafficProceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3460112.3472311(417-422)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3460112.3472311
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Dissecting Web Latency in Ghana
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Measurement
    2. Metrics
2. Networks
  1. Network protocols

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

IMC '14: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference

November 2014

524 pages

ISBN:9781450332132

DOI:10.1145/2663716

General Chair:
Carey Williamson
University of Calgary, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Aditya Akella
University of Wisconsin - Madison, USA
,
Nina Taft
Google, USA

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGMETRICS: ACM Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation
SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication
USENIX Assoc: USENIX Assoc

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 November 2014

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IMC '14

Sponsor:

SIGMETRICS
SIGCOMM
USENIX Assoc

IMC '14: Internet Measurement Conference

November 5 - 7, 2014

BC, Vancouver, Canada

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IMC '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 32 of 103 submissions, 31%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

Naatu FAlon IAmoako GMornah D(2023)Pro-environmental values’ and consumer behavior in base of the pyramid market: GhanaCompetitiveness Review: An International Business Journal10.1108/CR-02-2023-002634:4(807-831)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1108/CR-02-2023-0026
Chaqfeh MHaseeb MHashmi WInshuti PRamesh MVarvello MSubramanian LZaffar FZaki Y(2022)To Block or Not to Block: Accelerating Mobile Web Pages On-The-Fly Through JavaScript ClassificationProceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development10.1145/3572334.3572397(1-12)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3572334.3572397
Tieanklin NJohnson MHeimerl K(2021)Poster: The Low Impact of COVID-19 on Rural Community Network TrafficProceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3460112.3472311(417-422)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3460112.3472311
Johnson MLiang JLin MSinganamalla SHeimerl K(2021)Whale Watching in Inland Indonesia: Analyzing a Small, Remote, Internet-Based Community Cellular NetworkProceedings of the Web Conference 202110.1145/3442381.3449996(1483-1494)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442381.3449996
Kamiyama NSakurai KNakao A(2021)Measurement Analysis of Co-occurrence Degree of Web ObjectsIEEE INFOCOM 2021 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)10.1109/INFOCOMWKSHPS51825.2021.9484587(1-6)Online publication date: 10-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOMWKSHPS51825.2021.9484587
Arouna APhokeer AElmokashfi A(2021)A First Look at the African’s ccTLDs Technical EnvironmentTowards new e-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries10.1007/978-3-030-70572-5_19(305-326)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70572-5_19
Qazi IQazi ZBenson TMurtaza GLatif EManan ATariq A(2020)Mobile web browsing under memory pressureACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review10.1145/3431832.343183750:4(35-48)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3431832.3431837
Chaqfeh MZaki YHu JSubramanian L(2020)JSCleaner: De-Cluttering Mobile Webpages Through JavaScript CleanupProceedings of The Web Conference 202010.1145/3366423.3380157(763-773)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3366423.3380157
Zhuang SWang JZhang PWang J(2020)Understanding the latency to visit websites in ChinaComputer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking10.1016/j.comnet.2020.107102169:COnline publication date: 14-Mar-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.comnet.2020.107102
Zhang YXu KZhang YXu K(2020)Computing Issues in the EdgeNetwork Management in Cloud and Edge Computing10.1007/978-981-15-0138-8_8(129-138)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2020
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