could you tell me a bit more about what you're doing?
It lets you make good use of CPU time whilst waiting for the network.
It turns out simple heuristics can get 99% accuracy on the question of 'will the server return the same result as last time for this non-cachable response'.
However, since my machine has many CPU cores it made sense to have many 'speculative' copies of the browser going at once.
A regular fork() call would have worked, if not for the fact chromium is multi thread and multi process, and it's next to impossible to fork multiple processes as a group.
It'd be cool to predict which resources are speculation safe (ie the cache headers don't permit it, but the content in practice doesn't change) and speculate those resources but not ones which you have repeatedly had a speculation abort (ie actual dynamic resources). If your predictor gets a high enough hit rate, you could probably do okay with just a single instance/no snapshot and use an expensive rollback mechanism (reload the whole page non-speculatively?).
If you are guessing at the data anyway, what's the difference?
Why set up an entire speculative execution engine / runtime snapshot rollback framework when it sounds like adding heuristic decision caching would solve this problem?