I have spent the last decade designing techniques to improve and enhance the performance of the content distribution networks (CDNs) of large online services (e.g., Facebook and Yahoo!).  These techniques have been deployed at scale, upstreamed into opensource repositories, and have shifted how the community reasons about CDNs.  In this talk, I will discuss our efforts to improve Video Performance, understand QUIC performance, enhance CDN updates, and dynamically reconfigure CDNs.  In particular, I will identify key lessons with regards to measuring large scale CDNs and open research challenges in optimizing CDNs.  I will conclude by discussing a fundamental shift in my work — a shift from optimizing performance from the CDN perspective to optimizing performance from the client perspective. Specifically, I will highlight challenges that arise when exploring such a shift within the context of developing regions and present a broader vision for democratizing web performance.

About Theophilus Benson

Theophilus Benson is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. He earned his B.S. from Tufts, Ph.D. from U of Wisconsin – Madison, and post-doctorate from Princeton. Dr. Benson’s research focuses on improving the performance and availability of computer networks. His research was recognized by paper awards, including IMC, EuroSYS, ANRP. Dr. Benson received the SIGCOMM Test of Time Award, NSF CAREER Award, NEC Faculty Award, Google Faculty Award, Facebook Faculty Award (X2), Faculty Research and Engagement Program (X2). Dr Benson was recently named to DARPA’s ISAT (Information Science and Technology) study group.