Comments on: GWT performance with the latest JavaScript engines

By: Lombardi Development Blog » Blog Archive » Performance of modern JavaScript engines

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:09:46 +0000

[...] is a follow up to my post about GWT performance with the latest JavaScript engines. In the two months since that I wrote that there have been new releases of many of the browsers I [...]

By: Piotr

Piotr — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:08:00 +0000

Interesting research.
I just wonder what about Opera?

By: Des fraises au printemps » Comparer les performances des moteur JavaScript

Des fraises au printemps » Comparer les performances des moteur JavaScript — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:15:50 +0000

[...] GWT performance with the latest JavaScript engines [...]

By: Alex Moffat

Alex Moffat — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:08:19 +0000

@Samuel I actually did have jit enabled for the FF3.1 tests. The first set of tests I ran I had jit.content only on, I then did another set with jit.content and jit.chrome, which turned out to be slower. Perhaps there is something else I’m doing wrong but I did set the config options correctly.

@Thomas Broyer I agree about the js engine not being the only thing to consider. For the particular operations I’m measuring pretty much the only DOM operation is a single insert of a massive block of html so I think I’m mostly measuring js performance here. Damon talks about this in our google i/o presentation. I’d love faster DOM and CSS support.

@Tanguy Bayard IE8 numbers would be interesting. I didn’t have IE8 installed when I did the measurements though and my main focus was on how the new engines performed. I’ll probably rerun these tests with the next release of our software and I’ll try and include IE8 in the mix then.

By: Tanguy Bayard

Tanguy Bayard — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:44:45 +0000

Hello,

I am surprised that you did not try the benchmark with IE8. I do not know if IE8 contains js improvements, did it ? How much ?
IE7 is a 2 years old browser. JIT JavaScript compilation was not on the agenda at this time. Others browsers of this benchmark are no more than 1 year old, it sounds pretty normal to me that they beat IE7.

I hope that each browser will be 5 or 10 times faster than its own 2-years-ago version. It sounds very good for GWT and others js-based applications !

Concerning IE6 and IE7 support : I agree, you cannot do as good with IE6 & IE7 because it was not built for.

I would be also interested by having those results on other OS. May it be different ?

By: Vik

Vik — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:48:25 +0000

Great job! Thanks!

By: Thomas Broyer

Thomas Broyer — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 08:25:38 +0000

One thing to note: JavaScript engine != rendering engine. As soon as you deal with the DOM, the JavaScript engine isn’t anymore the only thing entering into play.
IE is known to have both a poor js engine and rendering engine; hopefully things will be better with IE8 (though I doubt it will enable it to compete with the others)

By: Samuel

Samuel — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 08:08:09 +0000

Hi,
I think TraceMonkey wasn’t enabled during your tests
In the beta version of FF3.1, it is disabled.

Here is how to set it up :
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/3381/firefox-31-how-to-enable-the-tracemonkey-javascript-engine/

Regards,
Samuel