Concurrent JavaScript Parsing for Faster Loading of Web Apps

Abstract

JavaScript is a dynamic language mainly used as a client-side web script. Nowadays, web is evolving into an application platform with its web apps , and JavaScript increasingly undertakes complex computations and interactive user interfaces, requiring a high-performance JavaScript engine. There have been many optimizations for efficient JavaScript engines, but one component that has not been optimized much is JavaScript parsing . A JavaScript function needs to be parsed before being executed, and the parsing overhead takes a substantial portion of JavaScript execution time for web apps, especially during app loading . This article proposes concurrent parsing of JavaScript, which performs the parsing of JavaScript functions in advance on different threads, while the main thread is executing the parsed JavaScript functions. This can hide the parsing overhead from the main execution thread, reducing the JavaScript execution time, thus reducing the overall app loading time. More specifically, we separated JavaScript parsing and made it run on different threads without violating the execution semantics of JavaScript. We also designed an efficient multi-threaded parsing architecture, which reduces the synchronization overhead and schedules the parsing requests appropriately. Finally, we explored two methods of choosing the target functions for concurrent parsing: one based on profiled information and the other based on speculative heuristics. We performed experiments on the WebKit browser with the JSC engine for real web apps. The result shows that the proposed concurrent parsing can improve the JavaScript performance during app loading by as much as 64% and by 39.7% on average. This improves the whole app loading performance tangibly, by as much as 32.7% and by 18.2%, on average.