Thread-level speculation as an optimization technique in Web Applications — Initial results

Abstract

Web Applications have become increasingly popular as they allow developers to use an uniform platform for user interactions. The dynamic programming language JavaScript used in most Web Applications has performance penalties, that have been addressed by traditional optimization techniques. We have found that while the performance gain of such techniques are positive for a set of established benchmarks, it often fails to improve the performance of real-life Web Applications. We suggest Thread-Level Speculation (TLS) at the JavaScript function level to automatically extract parallelism to gain performance. There have been multiple TLS proposals in both hardware and software, but little work has been done within JavaScript. Currently we are implementing our TLS ideas in a state-of-the-art JavaScript engine targeted for embedded mobile devices.