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.

The V8 project has made huge progress improving peak performance of web apps. With the advent of technologies like WebGL we’re seeing the emergence of highly interactive and graphically intensive apps, such as the new version of Google Maps, new games and demos. But with these new uses comes a need for better interactive performance in JavaScript.

Avoiding pauses is vital to achieving good interactive performance. 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 while maintaining great peak performance and memory use.

To evaluate the new GC, we took the most memory intensive peak performance test from the V8 Benchmark Suite and used it to make a stress test for interactive performance. In our testing the maximum time to render a frame including pause time is reduced from 272ms to 50ms.

The new GC in Chrome improves interactive performance and opens up new possibilities for the interactive web. If you are developing highly interactive web apps or games, please try it out and share your experiences. It is available now on the dev channel.

Posted by Vyacheslav Egorov and Erik Corry, Software Engineers