Chromium Blog
News and developments from the open source browser project
Octane: the JavaScript benchmark suite for the modern web
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
The web is evolving and so should the JavaScript benchmarks that measure its performance. Today, we are releasing
Octane
, a JavaScript benchmark suite that aims to measure a browser’s performance when running the complex and demanding web applications that users interact with daily.
Most of the existing JavaScript benchmarks run artificial tests that were created on an ad-hoc basis to stress a specific JavaScript feature. Octane breaks with this tradition and extends the former V8 Benchmark Suite with 5 new benchmarks created from full, unaltered [1], well-known web applications and libraries. A high score in the new benchmarks directly translates to better and smoother performance in similar web applications.
Here is an overview of the new tests:
Box2DWeb
runs a JavaScript port of a popular
2D physics engine
that is behind many well-known simulations and web games.
Mandreel
puts a JavaScript port of the 3D Bullet Engine to the test with a twist: The original C++ source code for the engine is translated to JavaScript by Onan Games’
Mandreel
compiler, which is also used in countless web-based games.
Pdf.js
is based on
Mozilla’s PDF reader
and shows how Javascript applications can replace complex native browser plug-ins. It measures how fast the browser decodes a sample PDF document.
GB Emulator
is derived from an
open source emulator
of a famous game console running a 3D demo.
CodeLoad
measures how quickly a JavaScript engine can bootstrap commonly used JavaScript libraries and start executing code in them. The source for this test is derived from open source libraries (
Closure
,
jQuery
).
Besides an expanded
set of benchmarks
, Octane also has an interface that makes it easier to read and that adapts automatically to tablet and mobile screens.
You can try out
Octane
yourself, browse the
source code
, or read more about each benchmark at the
Octane site
. Still have some questions? Have a look at the
FAQ page
.
[1]
Beside glue logic and emulation of canvas / DOM interaction where necessary.
Posted by Stefano Cazzulani, Product Manager
Better code optimization decisions for V8
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
As of current dev and beta channel releases, V8 uses a new algorithm based on counters to decide which functions to optimize. This greatly increases performance for small JavaScript programs. For example, on the SunSpider benchmark, which focuses on extremely short-running tests, V8's speed improved by about 25%.
When executing JavaScript, V8 at first compiles it to machine code with a very fast compiler that doesn't optimize the code it produces. V8 has a second,
optimizing compiler
that generates much faster machine code, but takes much more time to do so, so it has to be used selectively. That's why V8 must try to predict which functions will benefit most from optimization, and carefully decide when to optimize them.
In the past, V8 stopped once every millisecond to look at currently running functions, and eventually optimized them. For long-running programs, this worked great, but short-running programs often finished before they could benefit much from the optimizing compiler -- a single millisecond can be a long time to wait before optimizing! In addition, V8 often made different optimization decisions each time a JavaScript program ran, sometimes overlooking small but performance-critical functions.
The new version of V8 makes earlier and more repeatable optimization decisions by analyzing the running program in more detail. It uses counters to keep track of how often JavaScript functions are called and loops are executed in a program, approximating the time spent inside each function. That way V8 is able to quickly gather fine-grained information about performance bottlenecks in a JavaScript program, and to make sure that the optimizing compiler's efforts are spent on those functions that deserve it most.
The new algorithm is contained in the current beta channel releases -- go
give it a spin
now!
Posted by Jakob Kummerow, Software Engineer
V8 Benchmark Suite extended with physics simulation
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Today we are releasing version 7 of the
V8 Benchmark Suite
. This new version adds
Oliver Hunt’s
2D
Navier-Stokes
fluid dynamic simulation, which stresses intense double array computations. These complex double array computations are today common in games, graphic and scientific applications.
The new test shows the recent improvements V8 has made in handling advanced physics computations: the current
Chrome 18
(today in beta) delivers a 5% score improvement compared to the current Chrome 17.
Chrome 19
(today in canary), where the full set of improvements is being released, delivers a whopping 25% score improvement compared to Chrome 17.
With these additions, the V8 Benchmark Suite is now a more comprehensive collection of eight tests, including OS kernel simulation, crypto and string operations, memory management stress-tests, and as of today, double array computations.
We plan to keep updating the suite by adding more tests. These updates are a reflection of Chrome’s commitment to keep pushing the boundaries of speed, optimizing the engine for today’s more demanding web apps.
Posted by Stefano Cazzulani, Product Manager
A game changer for interactive performance.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Today we are announcing the release of Chrome’s new
incremental garbage collector
(GC) which dramatically improves interactive performance of web apps and HTML5 games.
The V8 project has made
huge progress
improving
peak performance
of web apps. With the advent of technologies like
WebGL
we’re seeing the emergence of highly interactive and graphically intensive apps, such as the
new version of Google Maps
,
new games
and
demos
. But with these new uses comes a need for better
interactive performance
in JavaScript.
Avoiding pauses is vital to achieving good interactive performance. Previously, garbage collection pause times depended on the amount of memory used. Therefore, large interactive apps were impacted by pauses that caused hiccuping. V8’s new GC reduces pause times dramatically while maintaining great peak performance and memory use.
To evaluate the new GC, we took the most memory intensive peak performance test from the V8 Benchmark Suite and used it to make a
stress test
for interactive performance. In our testing the maximum time to render a frame including pause time is reduced from 272ms to 50ms.
The new GC in Chrome improves interactive performance and opens up new possibilities for the interactive web. If you are developing highly interactive web apps or games, please try it out and share your experiences. It is available now on the
dev channel
.
Posted by Vyacheslav Egorov and Erik Corry, Software Engineers
Updating JavaScript Benchmarks for Modern Browsers
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Benchmarks are incredibly important for influencing the direction of JavaScript engines. Over the past two years, JavaScript has gotten dramatically faster across all major browsers, particularly in areas that popular benchmarks measure. As it turns out, browser developers are a competitive bunch. However, as JS engines get faster, benchmarks must evolve in order to keep pushing them in the right direction.
We’ve been constantly updating our
V8 benchmark suite
to force us to get faster in areas that are important to web developers. We’ve fixed bugs and added new tests for
regular expressions
and
memory management
. We’re very focused on JavaScript performance, so we scrutinize our benchmark carefully to make sure that it’s as useful a measuring stick as possible.
The two other widely cited JS benchmarks are
SunSpider
from Apple, and
Kraken
, a new benchmark from Mozilla.
SunSpider was one of the first suites of tests, first appearing in 2007. It’s done a lot to help improve JS engines, but many of the tests in the suite are less relevant to the web in 2011. Even for the more relevant tests, JavaScript has gotten so fast that many finish in only a few milliseconds. This just isn’t long enough to figure out which engine is faster--a golf cart and a Tesla will finish a 10-foot race in nearly the same time.
To make the benchmark more meaningful, we’ve experimented by making the race longer by running each of the tests in SunSpider 50 times consecutively. While repeating a trivial test many times isn’t a great solution, it does provide an opportunity for some optimization. With this change, the results begin to reflect Chrome’s true performance. It’s more than 30% faster on the SunSpider suite overall and up to 4x faster on some of the individual tests.
Kraken, a more modern benchmark, is in better shape. Unfortunately, the
canonical
version of the benchmark has not been updated to reflect all the latest changes which address at least
one important bug
. As a result, the benchmark is less useful and has even (mis)led us to spend time making some
irrelevant optimizations
in Chrome. To help us focus on the right things, we’re now testing the latest version of Kraken built directly from Mozilla’s source code repository.
We’re posting a
modified version of SunSpider
and the
latest version of Kraken
to make it easy to run the benchmarks in your own browser and compare results.
Posted by Mike Belshe, Software Engineer
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