How Much Can We Micro-Cache Web Pages?

Browser caches are widely used to improve the performance of Web page loads. Unfortunately, current object-based caching is too coarse-grained to minimize the costs associated with small, localized updates to a Web object. In this paper, we evaluate the benefits if caching were performed at a finer granularity and at different levels (i.e., computed layout and compiled JavaScript). By analyzing Web pages gathered over two years, we find that both layout and code are highly cacheable, suggesting that our proposal can radically reduce time to first paint. We also find that mobile pages are similar to their desktop counterparts in terms of the amount and composition of updates.