As of current dev and beta channel releases, V8 uses a new algorithm based on counters to decide which functions to optimize. This greatly increases performance for small JavaScript programs. For example, on the SunSpider benchmark, which focuses on extremely short-running tests, V8's speed improved by about 25%.

When executing JavaScript, V8 at first compiles it to machine code with a very fast compiler that doesn't optimize the code it produces. V8 has a second, optimizing compiler that generates much faster machine code, but takes much more time to do so, so it has to be used selectively. That's why V8 must try to predict which functions will benefit most from optimization, and carefully decide when to optimize them.

In the past, V8 stopped once every millisecond to look at currently running functions, and eventually optimized them. For long-running programs, this worked great, but short-running programs often finished before they could benefit much from the optimizing compiler -- a single millisecond can be a long time to wait before optimizing! In addition, V8 often made different optimization decisions each time a JavaScript program ran, sometimes overlooking small but performance-critical functions.

The new version of V8 makes earlier and more repeatable optimization decisions by analyzing the running program in more detail. It uses counters to keep track of how often JavaScript functions are called and loops are executed in a program, approximating the time spent inside each function. That way V8 is able to quickly gather fine-grained information about performance bottlenecks in a JavaScript program, and to make sure that the optimizing compiler's efforts are spent on those functions that deserve it most.

The new algorithm is contained in the current beta channel releases -- go give it a spin now!

Posted by Jakob Kummerow, Software Engineer