Chromium Blog: New JavaScript techniques for rapid page loads

Chromium Blog

News and developments from the open source browser project

New JavaScript techniques for rapid page loads

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Posted by Marja Hölttä and Daniel Vogelheim, Resident Loader Coders
Speed has always been one of Chrome's primary missions, ever since it was included as one of the founding principles in 2008. But speed is about more than just traditional Javascript benchmarks. Ideally every part of a user's interaction with a browser is fast, starting with loading web pages. Chrome is introducing two techniques called script streaming and code caching designed to reduce that painful waiting time spent staring at a white screen, especially on mobile devices.
Script streaming optimizes the parsing of JavaScript files. Previous versions of Chrome would download a script in full before beginning to parse it, which is a straightforward approach but doesn't fully utilize the CPU while waiting for the download to complete. Starting in version 41, Chrome parses async and deferred scripts on a separate thread as soon as the download has begun. This means that parsing can complete just milliseconds after the download has finished, and results in pages loading as much as 10% faster. It's particularly effective on large scripts and slow network connections.

Code caching is another new technique that helps speed up page loading, specifically on repeated visits to the same page. Normally, the V8 engine compiles the page’s JavaScript on every visit, turning it into instructions that a processor understands. This compiled code is then discarded once a user navigates away from the page as compiled code is highly dependent on the state and context of the machine at compilation time. Chrome 42 introduces an advanced technique of storing a local copy of the compiled code, so that when the user returns to the page the downloading, parsing, and compiling steps can all be skipped. Across all page loads, this allows Chrome to avoid about 40% of compile time and saves precious battery on mobile devices.These are two examples of ways Chrome is improving page load time, but page load time is just one way to think about the performance of the browser. Stay tuned for more ways the Chromium project is pushing forward all aspects of performance on the web.