IE8 Performance Improvements
[I know I haven't posted in a while, but I'm still here. Let's give this blogging thing another try!)
With all the news out of Mix today, one set of items I found interested was all the perf work that went in to IE8. From a few of the whitepapers on the IE msdn page:
- Improved jscript performance - the graphs I saw indicate something like 5-10x improvements on some common benchmarks
- Improved DOM access performance - document.getElementById, document.getElementsByTagName, etc.
- Killing of the infamous IE memory leak issue with circular references
- Improvements to page load performance
The last one there is particularly interesting, since I think IE is the first browser to make this the default:
Taking advantage of six connections per host on broadband Background An increasing number of users have broadband connections, so client-side bandwidth is not always a gating factor for performance. Typically, the time required to set up a connection and send a request dominates the time spent retrieving individual objects. By increasing the number of concurrent connections, Internet Explorer 8 allows sites to amortize that cost and churn through the list of pending objects more quickly, leading to an increase in user-perceived download time. Internet Explorer 8 consequently includes logic that detects whether the connection is narrowband or broadband and increases the number of connections per host to six if it‟s a high speed connection. Web authors may want to optimize delivery of content based on the number of connections available to their site. Therefore, Internet Explorer 8 also includes a scriptable property that exposes the connection limit per host in Internet Explorer 8.
