Predictive Preloading: Next Generation of Web Performance through AI

The premise is simple: loading the resources the user needs next before they are needed will greatly improve the performance of your web application. So why isn't everyone doing this already?

The reason is that predicting what a user will do next is much more complicated, and doing it so that you can make decisions in the browser during a live user session raises a lot of very interesting engineering and data science questions.

In this talk, we look at a predictive preload system that has been A/B tested with over 100 million users. We explore the machine learning models behind it based on hundreds of millions of user sessions, the performance improvements achieved, and the tradeoffs to consider.