10 Oct 08 I/O in Google Chrome
Google Chrome I/O
I have been reading up on the under the hood I/O performance of Google Chrome and I came across some very interesting tidbits. These tidbits are the basic foundations of why Google Chrome will be a contender in the new browser wars. It is a philosophy adopted by the engineers of Google to bring the best performance for a browser.
Here are the tidbits of Google Chrome you will find interesting:
- The main thread of Google Chrome ( the thread that runs the entire user interface) is not allowed to do any I/O.
- All disk operations are being called from a special background thread. This helps quite a bit in not causing the whole application to bomb.
The Google Chrome startup process looks like this:
- First chrome.exe and chrome.dll are loaded.
- The preferences file is loaded (it may affect how things proceed).
- Display the main window.
- The sub-process for rendering the first tab.
- Subsystems like bookmarks are loaded
- The cache, cookies, and the Windows networking libraries are not loaded until even later when the first network request is issued.
With this much thought gone into just the startup of the browser it sounds like the Google Chrome browser will have some very nice features (ie addons) in the future that will blow us away. I am not saying Firefox is a bad browser, but there are concepts here with Google Chrome Mozilla did not take into consideration for Firefox.
So you might be asking “How come the mac and linux versions of Google Chrome are not complete yet?” Well, I do believe the basic and most important foundation for these platforms have been completed. To have a fast stable cross platform browser out there on the market is a very important step in competing and maybe eventually winning the browser war.
Tags: Google Chrome
Leave a Comment
