{"id":165610,"date":"2013-11-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-21T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/give-in-to-procrastination-and-stop-prefetching\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T19:57:09","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T02:57:09","slug":"give-in-to-procrastination-and-stop-prefetching","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/give-in-to-procrastination-and-stop-prefetching\/","title":{"rendered":"Give in to Procrastination and Stop Prefetching"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>Generations of computer programmers are taught to prefetch network objects in<br \/>\ncomputer science classes. In practice, prefetching can be harmful to<br \/>\nthe user&#8217;s wallet when she is on a limited or pay-per-byte cellular data plan.<br \/>\nMany popular, professionally-written smartphone apps today prefetch large<br \/>\namounts of network data that the typical user may never use. We<br \/>\npresent Procrastinator, which automatically decides when to fetch each<br \/>\nnetwork object that an app requests. This decision is made based on whether the<br \/>\nuser is on Wi-Fi or cellular, how many bytes are remaining on the user&#8217;s data<br \/>\nplan, and whether the object is needed at the present time. Procrastinator does<br \/>\nnot require developer effort, nor app source code, nor OS changes \u2013 it<br \/>\nmodifies the app binary to trap specific system calls and inject custom code.<br \/>\nOur system can achieve as little as no savings to 4X savings in bytes<br \/>\ntransferred, depending on the user and the app. In theory, we can<br \/>\nachieve 17X savings, but we need to overcome additional technical challenges.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Generations of computer programmers are taught to prefetch network objects in computer science classes. In practice, prefetching can be harmful to the user&#8217;s wallet when she is on a limited or pay-per-byte cellular data plan. Many popular, professionally-written smartphone apps today prefetch large amounts of network data that the typical user may never use. We [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13547],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-165610","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-systems-and-networking","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2013-11-21","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"205152","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","title":"hotnets2013c.pdf","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/hotnets2013c.pdf","id":205152,"label_id":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[{"id":205152,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/hotnets2013c.pdf"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"sagarwal","user_id":33489,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=sagarwal"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"padhye","user_id":33179,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=padhye"},{"type":"text","value":"Chris Reiderer","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"lenin","user_id":32645,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=lenin"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144899],"msr_project":[171069],"publication":[],"video":[],"download":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":171069,"post_title":"AppInsight","post_name":"appinsight","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2012-12-02 19:45:04","post_modified":"2024-10-02 16:41:16","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/appinsight\/","post_excerpt":"To improve the quality of mobile apps, developers need to monitor app performance in the wild. This task is made challenging by the asynchronous nature of mobile apps, and the resource limitations of the mobile platform. To address this challenge, we have developed a system called AppInsight that instruments app binaries to automatically identify the critical path in user transactions, across asynchronous-call boundaries. AppInsight is lightweight, and does not need any changes to the phone&hellip;","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/171069"}]}}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/165610"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-research-item"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/165610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":514052,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/165610\/revisions\/514052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-content-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-content-type?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-highlight","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-highlight?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publication-type?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-product-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-product-type?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-focus-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-focus-area?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-platform","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-platform?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-download-source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-download-source?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-field-of-study","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-field-of-study?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-conference?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-journal","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-journal?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=165610"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=165610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}