
Abstract
Web access is prohibitively slow in many developing regions despite
substantial effort to increase bandwidth and network penetration. 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.
Materials