An in-depth study of mobile browser performance

Mobile page load times are an order of magnitude slower compared to non-mobile pages. It is not clear what causes the poor performance: the slower network, the slower computational speeds, or other reasons. Further, most Web optimizations are designed for non-mobile browsers and do not translate well to the mobile browser. Towards understanding mobile Web page load times, in this paper we: (1) perform an in-depth pairwise comparison of loading a page on a mobile versus a non-mobile browser, and (2) characterize the bottlenecks in the mobile browser vis-A-vis nonmobile browsers. To this end, we build a testbed that allows us to directly compare the low-level page load activities and bottlenecks when loading a page on a mobile versus a non-mobile browser. We find that computation activities are the main bottleneck when loading a page on mobile browsers. This is in contrast to non-mobile browsers where network activities are the main bottleneck. We also find that the composition of the critical path during page load is different when loading pages on the mobile versus the non-mobile browser. A key takeaway of our work is that we need to fundamentally rethink optimizations for mobile browsers.