Web Performance Tuning

How Browsers Work

The basic function of a browser is extremely simple. Any programmer with a good knowledge of Perl or Java can write a minimal but functional text-only browser in one day. The browser makes a TCP socket connection to a web server, usually on port 80, and requests a document using HTTP syntax. The browser receives an HTML document over the connection and then parses and displays it, indicating in some way which parts of the text are links to other documents or images. When the user selects one of the links, perhaps by clicking on it, the process starts all over again, with the browser requesting another document. In spite of the advances in HTML, HTTP, and Java, the basic functionality is exactly the same for all web browsers.

Let’s take a look at the functionality of recent browsers in more detail, noting performance issues. To get the ball rolling, the browser first has to parse the URL you’ve typed into the “Location:” box or recognize which link you’ve clicked on. This should be extremely quick. The browser then checks its cache to see if it has that page. The page is looked up through a quick hashed database mapping URLs to cache locations. Dynamic content should not be cached, but if the provider of the content did not specify an immediate timeout in the HTTP header or if the browser is not clever enough to recognize CGI output from URLs, then dynamic content will be cached as well.

If the page requested is in the cache and the user has requested via a preference ...