Google says the Chrome team has made significant improvements to memory management and caching.
Last June, Google touted a series of significant performance improvements to Chrome, sharing a blog post detailing how they achieved those improvements. Today, exactly two years later, the search giant is making headlines again by announcing further performance improvements to its Chrome browser.
Interestingly, Google isn't the only company making such claims lately. Microsoft also highlighted Edge's significant speed boost not too long ago. Both Microsoft and Google have cited the Speedometer 3.0 benchmark to gauge the performance of their platforms.
Specifically, Google said the Chrome team has made significant improvements to memory management and caching. This includes several efforts to redesign the memory layouts for many internal data structures used in components like the DOM, CSS, layout, and painting.
Google says that Blink, the rendering engine in Chromium, now 'avoids a lot of unnecessary churn' to better utilize CPU caches. In areas where memory handling previously relied on garbage collection in Oilpan, like the DOM (Document Object Model), the team has expanded that by switching from using malloc (memory allocation) to using Oilpan entirely.
( Note : Oilpan is the garbage collector in Blink).
Some of the memory management and caching improvements Google has made are the foundation for good code optimization. A senior Microsoft engineer recently pointed out many of these issues in apps that slow down Windows.
There are also improvements to string handling within the renderer; the hashing method has been updated to rapidhash, which is said to significantly improve performance. For cases where rendering tasks are inherently resource-intensive, such as computing CSS styles for different elements, Google added that caching techniques have been enhanced to achieve a higher cache hit rate and fewer cache misses.