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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

The current title ("significantly faster") on HN is suboptimal. What is there written relating the speed is that the new implementation:

"improves responsiveness and page load performance significantly (we're seeing 5-15% improvements on many visual metrics tests). Speedometer is about 10% faster with Warp."

"Warp is currently slower on various synthetic JS benchmarks such as Octane (which we will continue investigating in the coming months) but should perform well on web content."

It seems it can in the longer term generally improve though, and simplifications are always better.

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5-15% on web content is significantly faster to me. Also, like many people, I mainly use my browser for visiting websites instead of running things like Octane, but obviously it would be nicer if Octane were faster too.

>5-15% on web content is significantly faster to me.

Is it though? Would you even notice it?

If there was an already short processing action, e.g. 1 second, now it would be 850ms -- hardly noticable.

If there was some long processing action, say 5 minutes, now it would take 4 minutes and 25 seconds.

Hardly something to write home about in either case...

If I were to squeeze 10% out of a project I had spent significant time and resources optimizing I would be thrilled.

You and me yes. Users though not so much, because they already know the optimized previous performance, so they just see a meagre 10% over it -- that it's hard to optimize something already optimized and thus 10% is a feet is not relevant to their perception.

That fits into my definition of "significantly". It may not be a total game-changer, but if up to 15% isn't significant, where do we draw that line?

>but if up to 15% isn't significant, where do we draw that line?.

It's not like we don't have a yardstick for actually noticeable speed updates. Pre-JIT JS to JIT JS for example was a big several times speedup. PHP 6 vs PHP7 was several times as well (no JIT involved here, just other optimizations).

15% is only 'significant' in the context of an already heavily optimized program (which FF's JIT is). Not significant as in "the users will notice it".

I'm sorry friend, but 10% is a huge incremental improvement. This could save me hours over a year.

"Hours over a year" doesn't sound huge.

We've had export / fx processing improvements in NLE programs or 3D rendering for example that saved weeks over a year. PHP 6 to 7 got several times faster in common use-case workloads. And so on...

This is pretty mature technology, and like most mature technologies, there aren't going to be a lot of 50% improvements any more.

Look at CPUs or the Internal Combustion Engine. After 120+ years, it still improves, but you're looking at single-digit percentage points if that.

I'm not aware of a lot of things that could magically improve browser performance, but if you do, you have a great opportunity for a unicorn startup.

Internal combustion engines might not be the best example. They've seen REALLY impressive gains in the last couple of decades. =)

Today you can buy relatively affordable cars with 2.0 liter engines pushing 300 or more horsepower and doing so with greater fuel efficiency than cars with much more modest output from ten or twenty years ago.

(admittedly some of the gains in efficiency have been obscured by increases in vehicle weight)

> Here are just a few of the Talos/Raptor graphs showing improvements

> when Warp landed:

> - 20% on Win64 GDocs loadtime: https://mzl.la/3cp6dAs

> - 13% on Android Reddit SpeedIndex: https://mzl.la/2RUWdp8

> - 18% on pdfpaint: https://mzl.la/2HtXb9W

> - 8% on tp6 JS memory: https://mzl.la/3j2VwGb

> - 8% on damp (devtools perf): https://mzl.la/3kLbhSM

Sounds pretty significant to me

Yeah. That’s a massive speedup for Speedometer. It’s a big deal and everyone who contributed should be super proud.

JSC is pretty well tuned for it, finding a 0.5% speedup is hard. So seeing 10% speedups is impressive and rare. Of course, it’s possible that they are just catching up so they found the low hanging fruit - but also possible that they can leapfrog JSC (I haven’t measured if this gets them there or not).

> It’s a big deal and everyone who contributed should be super proud.

Thanks! We actually haven't really analyzed Speedometer (and most other benchmarks) yet with Warp so I expect this number to improve the coming months. The design seems to be holding up well and we're really excited about building on this.

Happy hacking! It’s good to see another JS compiler get brought up. I strongly suspect that our community hasn’t yet found the perfect kind of combo of tiers for JS; the more we try stuff the closer we will get.

What updated title would you propose?

> What updated title would you propose?

I believe, per HN policies, the most appropriate would be the title from the page: "Dogfooding Warp"

Specifically:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

The original title on the linked page is "Dogfooding Warp" and the title on this HN page is still, at the moment I write this, editorialized: "Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster"

“Dogfooding Warp” tells me almost nothing about what I’m about to read.

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