[webkit-dev] Parallel CSS styling

[Eric Seidel]

Do you have statistics on how much total time rendering flickr.com is
in CSS/Style code at all?  I believe it to be very low.

-eric

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 1:16 PM, Kulanthaivel Palanichamy
<kulanthaivel at codeaurora.org> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> At Qualcomm Innovation Center we have been working on a parallel algorithm
> for CSS styling and wanted to see if there is any interest in the
> community to see it implemented in WebKit. The overall idea is that we
> replace CSS matching and styling with a parallel implementation assuming
> there is a barrier before and after the computation. CSS style application
> will be performed by the main thread, such that we avoid the need to make
> thread safe data structures accessed in other passes. The algorithm is
> task-based, so we would need to implement a thread pool and a simple task
> scheduler (or maybe use an existing one).
>
> In particular, our algorithm requires modifying Element::recalcStyle() and
> some of the methods it invokes. Code that calls Element::recalcStyle()
> will not have to be changed. By the time Element::recalStyle() returns,
> all threads involved on the parallel CSS styling have completed their
> execution.  Effectively, there is a barrier when Element::recalcStyle()
> begins and another before it returns.
>
> Our experiments show that our CSS computation for complex websites scales
> rather well. For example, we observed that, for  flickr.com, Webkit spends
> 75% of its time in CSS doing CSS matching. Thus, our algorithm would give
> a maximum speedup of 1.6X on 2 cores and 2.3X on 4 cores.
>
> Please let us know whether this would be of interest to the community.
>
>
> -Kulanthaivel
>
> _______________________________________________
> webkit-dev mailing list
> webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org
> http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
>