The Effect of Thread-Level Speculation on a Set of Well-known Web Applications

Previous studies have shown that there are large differences between the workload of established JavaScript benchmarks and popular Web Applications. It has also been shown that popular optimization techniques, such as just-in-time compilation, many times degrade the performance of Web Applications. Further, since JavaScript is a sequential language it cannot take advantage of multicore processors. In this paper, we propose to use Thread-Level Speculation (TLS) as an alternative optimization technique for Web Applications written in JavaScript. Our TLS approach is based on speculation at the function level. We have implemented TLS inWebKit, a state-of-the-art web browser and JavaScript engine. Our results show speedups between 2 and 8 on eight cores for seven popular Web Applications, without any JavaScript source code changes at all. The results also show few roll-backs and the additional memory requirements for our speculation is up to 17.8 MB for the studied Web Applications.