V8’s incremental garbage collector: shorter pauses, better interactive performance

[2011-11-25] v8, jsengine, dev, javascript, chrome
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Quoting “A game changer for interactive performance” by Vyacheslav Egorov and Erik Corry for The Chromium Blog:
Today we are announcing the release of Chrome’s new incremental garbage collector (GC) which dramatically improves interactive performance of web apps and HTML5 games.
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Previously, garbage collection pause times depended on the amount of memory used. Therefore, large interactive apps were impacted by pauses that caused hiccuping. V8’s new GC reduces pause times dramatically[.]
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In our testing the maximum time to render a frame including pause time is reduced from 272ms to 50ms.
For large memory sizes, don’t do everything at once, do it in several steps.