Measuring What is Not Ours: A Tale of $3^{\text {rd}}$ Party Performance

Abstract

Content Providers make use of, so called ${\textit{3}}^{{ rd}}~{{ Party}}$ (${\textit{3P}}$) services, to attract large user bases to their websites, track user activities and interests, or to serve advertisements. In this paper, we perform an extensive investigation on how much such ${\textit{3Ps}}$ impact the Web performance in mobile and wired last-mile networks. We develop a new Web performance metric, the $\mathtt{3}^\mathtt{rd}~\mathtt{Party~Trailing~Ratio}$, to represent the fraction of the critical path of the webpage load process that comprises of only ${\textit{3P}}$ downloads. Our results show that ${\textit{3Ps}}$ inflate the webpage load time (PLT) by as much as 50% in the extreme case. Using URL rewriting to redirect the downloads of ${\textit{3P}}$ assets on ${\textit{1}}^{\textit{st}}~{\textit{Party}}$ infrastructure, we demonstrate speedups in PLTs by as much as 25%.