Article

Not so fast: analyzing the performance of webassembly vs. native code

Authors:

Abhinav Jangda,

Emery D. Berger,

Arjun GuhaAuthors Info & Claims

USENIX ATC '19: Proceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference

Pages 107 - 120

Published: 10 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

All major web browsers now support WebAssembly, a low-level bytecode intended to serve as a compilation target for code written in languages like C and C++. A key goal of WebAssembly is performance parity with native code; previous work reports near parity, with many applications compiled to WebAssembly running on average 10% slower than native code. However, this evaluation was limited to a suite of scientific kernels, each consisting of roughly 100 lines of code. Running more substantial applications was not possible because compiling code to WebAssembly is only part of the puzzle: standard Unix APIs are not available in the web browser environment. To address this challenge, we build BROWSIX-WASM, a significant extension to BROWSIX [29] that, for the first time, makes it possible to run unmodified WebAssembly-compiled Unix applications directly inside the browser. We then use BROWSIX-WASM to conduct the first large-scale evaluation of the performance of WebAssembly vs. native. Across the SPEC CPU suite of benchmarks, we find a substantial performance gap: applications compiled to WebAssembly run slower by an average of 45% (Firefox) to 55% (Chrome), with peak slowdowns of 2:08× (Firefox) and 2:5× (Chrome). We identify the causes of this performance degradation, some of which are due to missing optimizations and code generation issues, while others are inherent to the WebAssembly platform.

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Cited By

Geller AFrank JBowman W(2024)Indexed Types for a Statically Safe WebAssemblyProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36329228:POPL(2395-2424)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632922
Kjorveziroski VFiliposka S(2023)WebAssembly Orchestration in the Context of Serverless ComputingJournal of Network and Systems Management10.1007/s10922-023-09753-031:3Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10922-023-09753-0
Kjorveziroski VFiliposka S(2023)WebAssembly as an Enabler for Next Generation Serverless ComputingJournal of Grid Computing10.1007/s10723-023-09669-821:3Online publication date: 26-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10723-023-09669-8

Not so fast: analyzing the performance of webassembly vs. native code

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Guide Proceedings

USENIX ATC '19: Proceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference

July 2019

1076 pages

ISBN:9781939133038

Program Chairs:
Tsafrir Dan
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology & VMware Research
,
Malkhi Dahlia
VMware Research

Sponsors

VMware
Nutanix: Nutanix
NSF
Facebook: Facebook
ORACLE: ORACLE

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USENIX Association

United States

Publication History

Published: 10 July 2019

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Cited By

Geller AFrank JBowman W(2024)Indexed Types for a Statically Safe WebAssemblyProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36329228:POPL(2395-2424)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632922
Kjorveziroski VFiliposka S(2023)WebAssembly Orchestration in the Context of Serverless ComputingJournal of Network and Systems Management10.1007/s10922-023-09753-031:3Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10922-023-09753-0
Kjorveziroski VFiliposka S(2023)WebAssembly as an Enabler for Next Generation Serverless ComputingJournal of Grid Computing10.1007/s10723-023-09669-821:3Online publication date: 26-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10723-023-09669-8

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