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0 pointsotterley16d ago0 comments

How’s performance relative to bare metal or hardware virtualization?

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I ran two experiments:

~20x slower for a naive recursive Fibonacci implementation in Python (1300 ms for fib(30) in this VM vs 65ms on bare metal. For comparison, CPython directly compiled to WASM without VM overhead does it in 140ms.)

~2500x slower for 1024x1024 matrix multiplication with NumPy (0.25 GFLOPS in VM vs 575 GFLOPS on bare metal).

apignotti16d ago

This is not correct. You are using WebVM here, not BrowserPod.

WebVM is based on x86 emulation and JIT compilation, which at this time lowers vector instructions as scalar. This explains the slowdowns you observe. WebVM is still much faster than v86 in most cases.

BrowserPod is based on a pure WebAssembly kernel and WebAssembly payload. Performance is close to native speed.

johndough16d ago

I see. I thought they were the same and https://vitedemo.browserpod.io/ failed to load, so I was not able to test there.

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johndough16d ago

I ran two experiments:

~2500x slower for 1024x1024 matrix multiplication with NumPy (0.25 GFLOPS in VM vs 575 GFLOPS on bare metal).

apignotti16d ago

This is not correct. You are using WebVM here, not BrowserPod.

BrowserPod is based on a pure WebAssembly kernel and WebAssembly payload. Performance is close to native speed.

johndough16d ago

I see. I thought they were the same and https://vitedemo.browserpod.io/ failed to load, so I was not able to test there.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse