Friday, April 11th, 2008
Dromaeo: JavaScript Engine Testing
Category: JavaScript
, Performance
John Resig has put out Dromaeo maybe a touch before he wanted to due to people finding it :) The site hosts a subset of the WebKit Sun Spider JavaScript engine tests right now, with the desire to push on and do a lot more.
You can run tests and then compare your own results. What is particularly cool about all of this, is how we can harvest performance data. If enough people start running this bad boy from different parts of the world, and different devices (especially mobile devices) we will get a nice picture of performance of JavaScript engines.
The Mozilla Wiki has more information which covers the methodology, changes the other browsers would like to see, how to download and run locally, and a lot more.
Cool stuff. I hope to see this expand beyond JavaScript too and get even more “real world”.
Quite interesting results for me:
FF3 2008041107 - 2484.60ms
Safari 3.1 - 2668.40ms
Opera 9.50 beta - 3551.40ms
IE7 - Crashes
I’m surprised Opera fell down the list
My results:
System: P4/2.8HT
OS: Windows XP SP2
RAM: more than enough
Times:
Safari 3.1/Win: 3948.8ms
Firefox 3 beta 4: 4089ms
Opera 9.27: 7177.2ms
Firefox 2: ~21,000ms (ouch!)
IE6: CRASH
IE7(via VMware): Became unresponsive
Aren’t there 1000ms in a second? Seems a decimal has been misplaced.
Nice dinosaurs, reminds me of shrinky-dinks. I also really like the way he did the header. If you adjust your browser just so, the yellow T-Rex will ride the Stegasaurus.
I upgraded to beta 5 and ran beta 4 again for good measure. I got 4224 the second time with beta 4. In beta 5 I got 3625ms and 3550ms on two passes. Good work! Firefox is at the top of the mountain again!
If you guys are posting results you should link to the result pages. Every time you run a test it gives you a URL, usually something like:
http://dromaeo.com/?id=232
You can then compare the results together, like so:
http://dromaeo.com/?id=222,223,219
http://dromaeo.com/?id=232,226,229,237
http://dromaeo.com/?id=1858,1860,1925,1906 .
Safari 3.1 and Firefox 3 b5 are smoking fast on these (15s vs. 20s).
Opera 9.27 and Camino, not so much (both about 53s).
@JohnResig: Will there be a global result page, where we can compare browser/OS/device and so forth? I’m interested in how fast mobile devices all over the globe are these days.
For example I have an archos 605 (Opera mobile) and an S60 cell phone. I would like to share the results somehow.
Dell Vostro Laptop XP Dual Core:
http://dromaeo.com/?id=2725,2726,2727
IE7 Was no so bad at first, but at the string tests (base64) the browser botherd me with alert dialogs about response times, so I have to skip that test.
A question to mr. crockford if he read this. I have seen month ago a video series with you (at yahoo iirc) about javascript in generell and I think to remeber a part about types in javascript and that there is just number and so it does not make sence to use bit operators for example to to shift a number to devide it by 2 or so. I’m not sure anymore. Some of these tests using bitoperators … so I wonder if that is a good idea.
JohnResig: Neat idea. Unfortunately without any information about the platform the tests were run on, and which runs were done on the same platform but within different browsers, it’s gonna be near impossible to extract any sensible information out of this. :\
It could be a good idea to add field to generate or enter a “platform UID” so that people can bind their various runs to a single “platform UID”
Archos 605 Opera Mobile:
http://dromaeo.com/?id=3029