Grigorik, Ilya

Performance in Context

The execution of a web browser primarily involves three tasks: fetching resources, page layout and rendering, and JavaScript execution. That said, optimizing the last two tasks won’t do much good if the browser is blocked on the network, waiting for resources to arrive.

Of the top 100K, the median page on desktop requests 97 resources weighing 2,954KB in total, and makes 16 TCP connections . While the underlying transport (TCP) is optimized for large, streaming downloads, most network transfers in the browser are short and bursty.