Modern Web browsers like Firefox utilize just-in-time (JIT) compilers that look ahead through the batch of upcoming JavaScript instructions, to break down jobs into more efficient, more digestible work units. Theoretically, that means when the workload increases to 1,000, time consumed should be more like 7x or 8x. That's the type of scalability I want, and now expect, to see from a modern browser -- more so from a development build of Internet Explorer now than ever before.
When Opera Software last month told me its developers' opinion of the relative efficiency of one of the tests I had been using in our Relative Performance Index suite, I decided to pursue whether they were right. They were. Months earlier, I had resurrected an old test battery used by magazines in the Netscape days, which spun a single instruction a few thousand times and measured time elapsed. Well, in modern days, when a single instruction does nothing, and a thousand or a million repetitions of that instruction do nothing, just-in-time compilers see that it does nothing and, quite efficiently, "compile" that instruction to...nothing. So when it takes no time at all to do nothing, I frankly shouldn't be all that amazed.
