Waterfox: Changes that count, 23 May [Firefox 64-Bit]

23 May

There are many things that can be done to a program to improve performance and quite a few can be done during compile time. In the next version of Waterfox, the following changes will be implemented:

Switching to Intel's LibM from AMD's LibM

This provides a very little performance increase, but it's still there due to Intel's more efficient use of math functions.

The implementation of a better memory allocator (tcmalloc)

Memory allocators have come a long way, especially since the implementation of jemalloc in Firefox 3. A well written malloc can provide some nice performance benefits. Low memory and better CPU scaling are some of the advantages of a well implemented malloc (but since the release of Windows 7 and it's own memory allocator this is less of an issue). To gain some more small performance improvements, I have implemented tcmalloc from Google's Performance tools (the same memory allocator used in Google Chrome).

More information about tcmalloc can be found here.

Compilation using Intel's C++ Compiler

There's no doubt about it that ICC is one of the best compilers out there. Just a simple recompile of a program can net huge performance improvements. While a stable program is hard to achieve, it is not impossible. Therefore the next version of Waterfox will include as much of the code being compiled by ICC as possible while keeping the program stable and usable.