Hot-Rodding the Browser Engine: Automatic Configuration of JavaScript Compilers

Abstract: Modern software systems in many application areas offer to the user a multitude of parameters, switches and other customisation hooks. Humans tend to have difficulties determining the best configurations for particular applications. Modern optimising compilers are an example of such software systems; their many parameters need to be tuned for optimal performance, but are often left at the default values for convenience. In this work, we automatically determine compiler parameter settings that result in optimised performance for particular applications. Specifically, we apply a state-of-the-art automated parameter configuration procedure based on cutting-edge machine learning and optimisation techniques to two prominent JavaScript compilers and demonstrate that significant performance improvements, more than 35% in some cases, can be achieved over the default parameter settings on a diverse set of benchmarks.