An approach to adaptive execution outsourcing in JavaScript web applications

Abstract

With the advancement of HTML5 and the prevalence of internet enabled mobile devices, the popularity of web applications is increasing. As web applications are becoming more complex, the less powerful JavaScript engines on mobile devices have performance issues when loading computationally intensive web applications. These mobile devices may also have power constraints. Moreover, with the major web browsers each offering its own JavaScript engine, where some are significantly slower than the others, the performance of JavaScript intensive web applications may suffer even on personal computers. As an attempt to bring the advantages of fast JavaScript engines and powerful computer hardware to these constrained machines, this project proposes a framework for the adaptive execution outsourcing of JavaScript web applications. This framework, named JSCloud, achieves faster execution times on both mobile and desktop devices by migrating selected partitions of the web application code to powerful cloud servers for execution. In order to prepare a web application to suport JSCloud, the web developer only has to annotate methods which are computationally expensive. JSCloud would then inject migration code into the annotated methods. The result is a JSCloud enabled version of the given web application code. This version of code has a cost estimation algorithm which would initiate the migration when the algorithm deems that a reduction in execution time is gained when the execution of the partition is performed on a high performance JavaScript engine in a cloud machine. JSCloud aims to provide devices which have low JavaScript performances with better execution times via execution outsourcing. Experiments have shown that the execution time could be brought down by as much as 50% on devices with slower JavaScript engines.