Publications by Author: Guckert, Lauren

Over the past decade webpages have grown an order of magnitude in computational complexity. Modern webpages provide rich and complex interactive behaviors for differentiated user experiences. Many of these new capabilities are delivered via JavaScript embedded within these webpages. In this work, we evaluate the potential benefits of persistently caching compiled JavaScript code in the Mozilla JavaScript engine within the Firefox browser. We cache compiled byte codes and generated native code across browser sessions to eliminate the redundant compilation work that occurs when webpages are revisited. Current browsers maintain persistent caches of code and images received over the network. Current browsers also maintain inmemory “caches” of recently accessed webpages (WebKit’s Page Cache or Firefox’s “Back-Forward” cache) that do not persist across browser sessions. This paper assesses the performance improvement and power reduction opportunities that arise from caching compiled JavaScript across browser sessions. We show that persistent caching can achieve an average of 91% reduction in compilation time for top webpages and 78% for HTML5 webpages. It also reduces energy consumption by an average of 23% as compared to the baseline.