[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 132588] support for navigator.cores or navigator.hardwareConcurrency

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132588





--- Comment #5 from Filip Pizlo <fpizlo at apple.com>  2014-05-05 21:28:37 PST ---
(In reply to comment #4)
> My turn to chime in.
> 
> - Reiterating the fingerprinting problem that's already been mentioned that we have no response to.
> - "Number of physical cores" does not correlate to the number of simultaneous tasks supporter
> - "Number of physical cores" does not correlate to computing resources currently available.
> 

I believe that they want the equivalent of hw.availcpu which isn't what either of your bullets tell you. 

> There modern approach to "let me do as much work as possible without hindering overall performance on the system" that at least some systems support.  Grand Central Dispatch on OS X, for example, will executed more tasks simultaneously when the resources are available but scale back when other apps demand some resources.
> 
> Is there a real problem that having this bit available would solve that couldn't also be solved by a GCD-style mechanism?

Yes. Absolutely. Numerical parallel algorithms are often written in a worker-per-CPU style and this ends up being faster than the mini-task model of GCD. 

But that's sort of besides the point - there are many things about GCD that would make it hard to do on the web anytime in the near future. Probably the biggest is that it relies on shared memory, which web workers don't give you.

-- 
Configure bugmail: https://bugs.webkit.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are the assignee for the bug.