Cloudflare launches Early Hints, which speeds up page loading

by ddos ·

Cloudflare recently announced the launch of Early Hints. The purpose of launching this function is to improve the loading speed of web pages. According to tests, the loading speed of web pages can be increased by about 30% after using this function. This can significantly improve the experience for both the website and the user.

It is worth noting that Google Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft browsers all promise to provide support for this feature, and Google Chrome has already supported this feature in the development channel. This compatibility speed is very fast. However, Apple’s Safari browser has not yet promised to support Early Hints. Generally, Apple’s progress in supporting these new features is relatively slow.

Image: Cloudflare

The principle of the current Web technology to request content, when the user clicks on a link, the browser sends a request to the server, and after receiving the response from the server, the content to be rendered and the resources to be downloaded are determined, then start to use the rendering engine to draw the web page after the reception is complete. In this process, the response time is required to pass the request back and forth. This response time is called the server thinking time. When the server is busy, the thinking time will be longer, and at this time the browser will enter an idle state until the server sends an instruction to start the next step.

The concept of Early Hints is to use the server’s thinking time to deliver content. When the browser sends a request to the server and waits for a response, the edge network line sends a page loading prompt to the browser, allowing the browser to start preparing the resources needed to render the page. When the browser receives a response from the server, it can immediately start page rendering, which significantly improves the page load time.

In other words, Early Hints utilizes server thinking time and divides the web page loading process into two for asynchronous processing, thereby reducing the time wasted by the browser and server time and ultimately achieving the purpose of web acceleration.

Cloudflare said that strictly speaking, Early Hints is a web standard, which defines the new HTTP status code 103 Early Hints and defines new interaction behaviors between the client and the server. Before the server sends out HTTP 200 OK, the CloudFlare system sends out an HTTP 103 status code in advance and contains a prompt that the web page needs to load resources, helping the browser to load the page faster and improve the user experience.

Image: Cloudflare

 

Tags: CloudflareEarly HintsHTTP 103 status code