How to improve Webkit performance?

Like for the other parts of Qt, having great performance is important for QtWebKit.

Traditionally, QtWebKit has been mostly used on desktop computers for advanced layouting, hybrid applications or simply to browse the web. On a modern computer, the speed of WebKit is not a problem.

The world has changed, and QtWebKit is now used on mobile phones running Maemo, Symbian or Windows CE, and it is more and more used in embedded application on various devices.

Working on what matters

To improve the performance of WebKit, we works with benchmarks. Those benchmarks are used as use cases when profiling WebKit and to evaluate the gain of our patches.

Those benchmarks and the tools are available on Gitorious, in the QtWebkit performance repository.

WebKit gives a lot of possibilities, and we try to focus our work on what matters. For the performance work, we use real webpages, and look for ways to improve WebKit in the way it is used on the Web.

How we benchmark WebKit

The performance suite has three kinds of tools:

  • host tools: to manage the data used by the benchmarks
  • tests: the benchmarks
  • reductions: some benchmarks for specific components of WebKit

Let's have a look at the tools and the tests. The full documentation of the performance suite is on the WebKit's wiki.

Mirroring the web

For the benchmark, we do not want to access Internet directly. We want to compare the results from one run to the other, so we don't want the pages to change arbitrarily. Using the Web for benchmarking would also create an important load on the servers.

To use real pages without going online, we create databases of web pages with the mirror application:

Process of webpage mirroring

Those databases are snapshots of webpages at a given point in time, and they are used as input of the benchmarks.

The mirror application uses WebKit to load the pages and intercept all network requests. This means the database also includes resources that are loaded lazily via Javascript.

Using the benchmarks

There are two ways to exploit the databases with the benchmark: the online and offline modes. The difference lies in the way we provide the database's content to the benchmarks:

Modes of benchmarking

In the "online mode", we use a basic web server to serve the database over HTTP. The benchmarks use the complete stack to load pages, as they would if we were loading the page from Internet.

In the "offline mode", the database is loaded directly by the benchmarks and is used as the source of data. In that case, the network is not involved. This mode is mostly useful for the benchmarks that do not involve the network (like measuring the rendering speed).

What is measured

The benchmark suite is still a work in progress. Currently, there are benchmarks for:

  • the page loading performance (with or without rendering)
  • the rendering performance
  • the scrolling performance

How you can use that?

If you use WebKit, and are interested in great performance, you can use the performance suite to profile the use case you are interested in, and optimize those cases.

If you evaluate the use of WebKit for embedded, you can use the benchmark to evaluate how good WebKit performs on the hardware.

If you make patches for WebKit's performance, have a look on how to contribute. You can also join us on IRC in #qtwebkit on freenode.


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