Chrome Gets Improves Memory Performance, But Firefox Leads

Google added an incremental garbage collector, which improves the memory performance of the browser and promises better “interactive performance” with web apps and HTML5 games.

According to Google, garbage collection pause times previously depended on the amount of memory used. The result was an effect that Google describes as “hiccuping”. The new garbage collector in Google’s V8 JavaScript engine now reduces those pause times “dramatically while maintaining great peak performance and memory use,” Google said.

The company proves its point with a WebGL benchmark in which Chrome’s score increases from 6 in the current stable version 15 to 34 in the developer and nightly version (Chrome and Chromium 17) that integrate the incremental garbage collector (on our test system). However, Chrome is not the best browser in this test. Our Opera 11.60 checked in with a score of 46, the latest Firefox 11 nightly build with 48 and the current stable Firefox 8 with 126. Compared to the 590 frames Chromium was able to paint within 10 seconds, Firefox achieved 617.

Google said that the new garbage collector “improves interactive performance and opens up new possibilities for the interactive web.” There are no real-world examples of the performance changes of the incremental garbage collector yet.

You can try the improvements in a Chrome 17 dev build.

Wolfgang Gruener in Products on November 22