Wayne Pan

Just came across the ajaxian post about smushit.com which was presented at The Ajax Experience by Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan. It’s a nifty tool that optimizes images on any web page you pass it by using doing lossless compression or stripping out image meta tags.

I had a little fun with this tool running it on Google.com and Yahoo.com. (Just ignore any png compatibility issues and caching while you read the following… )

Google.com has 1 image and SmushIt reports it can be compressed 507 bytes (5.92% savings!) by converting it to a png. Assuming a very conservative 200 million requests a month on google.com alone that’s a savings of … if my math is correct … 100 gigs of bandwidth!

Yahoo.com could save even more, 8310 bytes (12.04% savings). Using the same numbers above that’s 1,547 gigs of bandwidth in the US alone!

The recent javascript vm wars harken back to the video card wars of the early 2000’s where 3dfx, ATI, and NVIDIA where trading blows. Instead of we have Google, WebKit, and Mozilla trading blows by releasing a faster and faster vm at what seems like a weekly rate.

Yesterday WebKit’s latest salvo is SquirrelFish Extreme. After chuckling a bit at the name, I decided to run it through the same benchmarks as I ran Chrome through.

WebKit-r36647

• Dromaeo - 7067.20ms (this is what used to be v2.dromaeo.com
• SunSpider - 1562.0ms
• V8 Benchmark - 720

If you take a look at the previous results you’ll notice that the new SquirrelFish Extreme (SFX) preforms significantly better than Chrome or FF in their own benchmark, SunSpider. It comes within 363 points in the V8 Benchmark tests. Also it holds relatively steady in the dom head tests for Dromaeo.

All and all, SFX isn’t hardly ready for prime time and it appears that the WebKit team is making significant progress.

I’ve been playing around with this awesome new visualization tool called Ubigraph. It is very easy to start producing something that looks stunning but it’s very hard to make it useful. I’ve taken out the labels in the following picture but it’s a mapping of objects in the AdMob system. The issue now is how to make it useful…

On a side note I highly sugggest using ruby + rubigraph if you want to start playing around with Ubigraph. It is incredibly easy.

After reading about the new JavaScript VM in Google Chrome (called V8) I was wondering how it would stack up against the new JS engines from Mozilla (TraceMonkey) and WebKit (SquirrelFish). I ran 3 tests across all the browsers, including IE8, and here are the results.

Setup:

• Chrome [Build 1583 - 0.2.149.27]
• FireFox 3.1 Nightly [1.9.1b1pre/200809020331]
  - w/ javascript.options.jit.* set to true except in the SunSpider tests, where jit.content was set to false because it crashes.
• WebKit Nightly [r36012]
• Internet Explorer 8 [IE8 v8.0.6001.18241]
  - I doubt numbers are accurate, asked me once for Chrome tests if I wanted to stop the unresponsive script, about 50x for Dromaeo
• Windows XP SP3, AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2GB RAM
• Restart each browser after every test
• SunSpider, V8 BenchMark, Dromaeo

Click continue for results and charts…
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