Back in June last year, Google touted some great performance improvements for Chrome and shared a blog post explaining in detail how it managed to achieve them. Today, almost exactly a year later, the search giant is back again with another such post as it continues to make performance gains in its Chromium browser.
Interestingly, Google is not the only one to make such claims in recent times. Microsoft also highlighted recently how Edge was getting significantly faster. Both Microsoft and Google have cited the Speedometer 3.0 benchmark to test.
We recently measured browsing performance during our T-Force DDR5-7200 RAM review, also using Speedometer 3.0.
In its blog post, Google says that the development team made significant improvements to memory management and caching. This includes some redesigning effort of the memory layouts for many internal data structures used in components such as DOM, CSS, layout, and painting.
Google says that Blink, the rendering engine in Chromium, now "avoids a lot of useless churn" so as to make better use of the CPU caches. In the areas where memory handling previously relied on garbage collection in Oilpan, like the DOM (document object model), the team has expanded that by shifting from using malloc (memory allocation function) to Oilpan entirely.
For those wondering, Olipan is the garbage collector in Blink.
Some of the memory management and caching improvements Google made are fundamental to good code optimization. If you recall, recently, a senior Microsoft engineer also pointed out many of these issues in apps that slow Windows down.
There are also improvements in handling strings within the renderer; the hashing method was updated to rapidhash, which is said to improve performance. For when rendering tasks become inherently expensive, such as computing CSS styles for various elements, Google adds that caching techniques have been enhanced to achieve higher cache hits and fewer misses.
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