Chrome 10 Beta Boosts JavaScript Speed By 64% 169
CWmike writes "Google released the first beta of Chrome 10 on Thursday, and Computerworld found it to be 64% faster than its predecessor on Google's V8 JavaScript benchmarks. But in another JS benchmark — WebKit's widely-cited SunSpider — Chrome 10 beta was no faster than Chrome 9. Yesterday's Chrome 10 beta release was the first to feature 'Crankshaft,' a new optimization technology. Google engineers have previously explained why SunSpider scores for a Crankshaft-equipped Chrome show little, if any, improvement over other browsers. 'The idea [in Crankshaft] is to heavily optimize code that is frequently executed and not waste time optimizing code that is not,' said the engineers. 'Because of this, benchmarks that finish in just a few milliseconds, such as SunSpider, will show little improvement with Crankshaft. The more work an application does, the bigger the gains will be.' [Chrome 10 beta download here.]"
Re:so... (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Google didn't say it, computer world did.
2) Existing benchmarks like SunSpider are not necessarily good indicators of the performance of all real web pages. For small pages with little JS it makes no difference whether the engine is fast or not - all you care about startup latency. The large AJAX pages we're seeing these days are hitting different bottlenecks, and so you need different benchmarks to emulate that workload. The apparent achievement of crankshaft is to improve the performance of long-running JS without increasing the startup latency of short-lived pages. Well done to Chrome for looking at real-world performance instead of worrying about who has the fastest SunSpider numbers.
Re:so... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait, a company says their thingy is 64% faster! Then other people test it and say no it's not... then the company says "You have to test it OUR way!" Is the next step that Google specifically engineers their code just to run the benchmarks themselves faster with no real improvement anywhere else? Sound familiar? (ATI/Nvidia)
You read that backwards. Chrome 10 made no difference over Chrome 9 in benchmarks, but ComputerWorld said it was 64% faster. Google stated that Chrome 10 was more optimized for real code, not benchmarks. Geez man, I didn't even RTFA. I got all that from the summary. Have we gotten so lazy we're not even reading summaries?
Re:64%? (Score:1, Insightful)
64% speed boost? Text-based AJAX content is going to be even more imperceptibly faster, wow!
All this optimization work on a subpar language like JavaScript just to display text that much faster. It's admirable but ultimately not as important as people make it out to be.