Reducing startup latency in web and desktop applications
Dennis M. Lee, Jean-Loup Baer, Brian N. Bershad, Tom Anderson · 1999
Application startup latency has become a performance problem for both desktop applications and web applications. In this paper, we show that much of the latency experienced during application startup can be avoided by more efficiently packing application code pages. To take advantage of more efficient packing, we describe the implementation of demand paging for web applications. Finally, we show that combining demand paging with code reordering can improve application startup latency by more than 58%. 1 Introduction Program startup latency is an important performance problem for both desktop and web applications. Desktop applications are becoming larger and improvements in disk and network speeds have not kept up with the improvements in CPU speed. For example, Microsoft Word 2.0 on an Intel 66 Mhz 486 takes about 14 seconds to start, while Microsoft Word 7.0 on a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro takes almost 17 seconds to start. The situation is worse for web applications on the Internet. ...