Release The Kraken

http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/09/14/release-the-kraken/

by brandonkm • 16 years ago

72 34 16 years ago

blog.mozilla.com

wmf2• 16 years ago

Is there any documentation? What are the components of this benchmark?

mbrubeck2• 16 years ago

If you run the benchmark, the results include a list of the tests with links to short explanations.

EDIT: Click to the results page and explanation links: http://bit.ly/cXTBUb (using a redirect because HN broke when I used the real URI)

Here's the list:

  ai:                          922.9ms +/- 3.2%
    astar:                     922.9ms +/- 3.2%

  audio:                      5564.5ms +/- 3.4%
    beat-detection:           1996.1ms +/- 5.2%
    dft:                       821.8ms +/- 6.8%
    fft:                      1965.6ms +/- 6.0%
    oscillator:                781.0ms +/- 0.9%

  imaging:                    2875.9ms +/- 1.4%
    gaussian-blur:            1271.2ms +/- 1.1%
    darkroom:                  510.1ms +/- 0.7%
    desaturate:               1094.6ms +/- 4.0%

  json:                        365.9ms +/- 1.6%
    parse-financial:           235.5ms +/- 1.6%
    stringify-tinderbox:       130.4ms +/- 2.1%

  stanford:                   2392.1ms +/- 3.2%
    crypto-aes:                468.7ms +/- 2.0%
    crypto-ccm:                656.2ms +/- 3.5%
    crypto-pbkdf2:            1063.0ms +/- 4.5%
    crypto-sha256-iterative:   204.2ms +/- 2.9%

wmf2• 16 years ago

Looks like a heavy focus on compute-intensive tasks. A* is definitely worth optimizing since it will help games.

natmaster• 16 years ago

Click on any of the components and it will explain the benchmark and give the source (which is heavily documented).

kingkilr2• 16 years ago

It'd be nice if one of the JS benchmarks actually POST'd the results back to the server, with current browser, and had a UI that allowed comparing the results for different browsers on different tests.

mbrubeck2• 16 years ago

Both Kraken and Sunspider provide results in a form that you can copy and paste, and a UI for comparing results from different browsers. (But they don't let you view results from previous users, which I guess might be what you're asking for.)

kingkilr2• 16 years ago

Right, I'm asking for a way to see results in aggregate. Admittingly there's a problem of differing hardware (which I somehow overlooked).

patrickaljord• 16 years ago

Firefox4 is faster than chrome here on ubuntu lucid x86_64 on an i5 with 8g of RAM.

Results for firefox 4 beta7:

http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.com/kraken-1.0/results.html?%...

Results for chrome 7.0.517.0 dev:

http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.com/kraken-1.0/results.html?%...

bd• 16 years ago

Here are my results (Win7 64b, Core2 Duo 2.4 GHz):

  Minefield 4 b6           9737.7ms
  Opera 10.62             14490.8ms
  Chrome 7.0.517.5 dev    18375.4ms
  Firefox 4 Beta 5        21721.1ms
  Safari 5.0              22168.6ms 
  Firefox 3.6.9           30053.3ms
  Explorer 9 PP4          64817.2ms

Though, usual caveat, it's kind of expected that the creator of the benchmark will perform the best (see my older comments on browser benchmarks [1][2]).

What's probably more interesting is the order of other browsers (for which this benchmark should be less tuned) - again Opera performed very well (and better than Chrome).

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1676456

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1458529

epochwolf2• 16 years ago

My results (OSX 10.6, Core2 Duo 2.4GHz)

    Safari 5            13939.9ms +/- 1.6%
    Chrome 6.0.472.55   19155.2ms +/- 1.3%
    Firefox 3.6.4       23567.1ms +/- 2.8%

msbarnett• 16 years ago

Yeah, on my MacBook Pro (OS X 10.6, Core i5 2.4GHz) I got

  Safari 5               11018.2ms +/- 0.3%
  Chrome 6.0.472.55      15342.7ms +/- 1.0%
  Firefox 3.6.8          18917.6ms +/- 0.1%

Interesting (but maybe not surprising) to see that Safari is consistently being reported as faster than Chrome on OS X, but not on Windows.

DiabloD35• 16 years ago

I think JS performance on Firefox has now reached the point where its good enough. All I ask for now is parts of the UI to become multithreaded so as to prevent the random issues one gets when having in the neighborhood of 150 tabs.

chc• 16 years ago

I don't think there's a software solution for the issues someone with 150 tabs open must have.

blasdel4• 16 years ago

Yes there is. It's called Google Chrome. I presently have 164 tabs open in it across 6 windows. It works just fine.

I am regularly amused by the stream of inane blog posts from "UX Professionals" declaring bankruptcy because oh god they have 22 tabs open — and then they go on to propose some ridiculous unbuilt UI that's even less capable, but makes them feel designery.

Chrome does start to bog down eventually, and I can respond to that by killing off worker processes, which leaves the swath of tabs it was responsible for dead, but still in place with their URL and I can just hit refresh. With Firefox the whole browser will repeatedly lock up for seconds at a time at a much lower usage threshold and eventually crash completely, taking 5 minutes out of my day. Before I switched to Chrome, I would have Firefox would crash at least 10 times per week. That and their regular releases baking AwesomeBullshit into Firefox instead of releasing extensions was more than enough to compel me to ditch it.

sreque• 16 years ago

This isn't a problem with 150 tabs. An example of this problem is the firefox GWT developer mode plugin. When your app is compiling in this mode, which can take upwards of 30 seconds, the entire browser, including all tabs and windows, locks up. If for some reason the plugin screws up, you have to kill and restart the entire browser.

harshpotatoes2• 16 years ago

On mine, I notice Opera performs the worst by more than double.

(Win7, AMD Athlon XP2400 2.0GHz)

  Chrome 6.0.472.55 beta:      46946.5ms
  Opera 10.62:                234444.6ms
  IE9:                         71864.8ms

ZeroGravitas• 16 years ago

Those results would be roughly similar to the other poster's if you removed one of the four 4s in the Opera results. Maybe just a typo?

harshpotatoes2• 16 years ago

Not a typo (hopefully the links don't break): http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.com/kraken-1.0/results.html?%...

http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.com/kraken-1.0/results.html?%...

Of course it performs much worse on this benchmark than other browsers on my old hardware, but I haven't noticed any problems while browsing.

modeless• 16 years ago

I see what's going on here. Mozilla's trace compilation approach has a lot of startup overhead but produces extremely fast optimized code for inner loops. Therefore, their benchmark includes compute-intensive tests with long-running inner loops to amortize out the costs of JIT compilation and focus on the raw speed of the generated code, where they beat Chrome.

(Note that I'm not saying this is unfair or biased at all. This is a good set of benchmarks to have.)

nitrogen• 16 years ago

The beat detection section was most interesting to me, as I spent a lot of time trying (and mostly failing) to do reliable beat detection when I was in high school for an XMMS plugin. It amazes me that this is now possible in a web browser.

Release The Kraken

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