Ajax and double buffering..

As I look at the new www.live.com interface, a thought came to my mind. I think it would be cool if the very first time an Ajax application is loaded, the web server would collect all the information from whatever different sources (which can be cached on the webserver) and send it down instead of having different content areas that make individual requests while displaying "Loading...".

This gives the appearance of a page that loads faster. Similar to the concept of double buffering.

The images, Css etc will obviously still be seperate requests the first time and will be pulled from the browser cache on subsequent requests.

Some other things:

  • www.live.com makes ≈ 300-340 requests just to load the homepage with a cleared cache. This is including all css, js, images and the content.
  • Google Personalized Homepage makes ≈ 16 requests
  • my.yahoo.com makes ≈ 84 requests

    These will vary according to how many content areas you have.
  • www.msn.com makes ≈ 45 requests

We know RFC 2068 states that:
Clients that use persistent connections SHOULD limit the number of simultaneous connections that they maintain to a given server. A single-user client SHOULD maintain AT MOST 2 connections with any server or proxy.

So by "double buffering", we might be able to reduce the number of requests and give the appearance of a faster loading page. On the other hand, as connections become faster, this might not be an issue at all.

Thoughts anyone?

 

1 Comment

  • So you mean instead of doing 300 small requests, just do one big one? That would make a whole lot of sense to me.



    Especially when you think the HTTP header may be 100 bytes or so, if the requested data isn't much bigger than that, then you're just wasting all that extra overhead.

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