According to the latest figures, Google Chrome is still the world’s most popular browser and currently has a dominant 54.41% market share. This is down to Google’s reputation, the amount of extensions Chrome supports and an extremely fast browsing experience. Of course, all the major browser companies work pretty hard to fine tune each version and improve load times while fixing any bugs. Recently, Google managed to improve Chome’s startup time by 17% and reduced the page load times by 6%. Additionally, the new tab load times dropped by a massive 15%. This was made possible thanks to Microsoft’s Profile Guided Optimisation (PGO).
In basic terms, PGO measures the way users interact with an application, then uses the data to optimise the most commonly used features. Once complete, the basic functions most people use can be improved rather effectively. Here we can see more detailed information on PGO and how it works:
“To gather this data, the nightly build process now produces a special version of Chrome that tracks how often functions are used. PGO then optimizes those high-use functions for speed, in some cases increasing the binary size of those functions. To balance out that increase, PGO also optimizes less-used functions with smaller, though slightly slower code. These trade-offs result in higher overall performance, and a smaller overall code footprint.”
“PGO also optimizes the memory location of the code, moving rarely-used functions away from frequently-used ones in memory. This results in more optimal use of the CPU instruction cache by avoiding caching of less-used code, increasing overall performance. There are many other tricks that PGO uses to make Chrome faster, and they add up to great results.”
This is a really fantastic piece of technology and Microsoft should be applauded for their hard work. The ability to use this to load pages much faster is wonderful and the improved speed should greatly enhance the browsing experience for Chrome users.
Image courtesy of Technobuffalo.
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