V8 - the extremes

When it comes to the V8 Benchmarks, Chrome is still king, even on a Mac. Despite the fact that this is running under Parallels, Chrome 2 is almost twice as fast on the iMac as it is on the Dell at work.

Here is the real surprise. While every other browser ran faster on the iMac than the Dell, IE8 actually slowed down. But the slow down is almost entirely due to the final test, Splay. Google describes this test:

Data manipulation benchmark that deals with splay trees and exercises the automatic memory management subsystem (378 lines).

So it seems that the VM on the Mac can have performance issues with memory management.

If there is a problem with memory management, perhaps I should shut down all of the other applications and see if the numbers improve. Yup. Look at Splay: it went from 0.397 to 143.

So, running Parallels usually works fine, but in this case, it seems important to help the memory management along by closing down other applications. Still, it is IE8 which is far behind the other browsers in terms of JavaScript performance. Hey Microsoft, any chance you can keep up with the pack?

V8 Benchmarks

Google's V8 Benchmark Suite is easy to run. Here are the results for several new browsers on my workstation, which is a Dell Optiplex GX620 with 2.79 GHz Pentium D and 3.49 GB of RAM. Wow. I didn't expect to see Webkit being this much faster. If my brand new Firefox 3.5 is given a relative score of 1, Safari 4 on Windows has a score of 7.5, Google Chrome has a relative score of 8.6. Internet Explore 8 has a score of 0.21. Webkit browsers have an order of magnitude better performance than Microsoft's flagship browser: IE8.

So, is Microsoft that bad a writing a JavaScript interpreter or are they trying to move us away from web standards like JavaScript and toward Silverlight?