Benchmarking Runtime Scripting Performance in Wasmer

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the use of Wasmer and WebAssembly (WASM) as a sandboxed environment for general-purpose runtime scripting. Our work differs from prior research focusing on browser-based performance or SPEC benchmarks. In particular, we use micro-benchmarks and a macro-benchmark (both written in Rust) to compare execution times between WASM and native mode. We first measure which elements of script execution have the largest performance impact, using simple micro-benchmarks. Then we consider a Web proxy caching simulator, with different cache replacement policies, as a macro-benchmark. Using this simulator, we demonstrate a 5-10x performance penalty for WASM compared to native execution.