Google Chrome is up to 15% faster, thanks to Microsoft

Google Chrome has received some performance improvements applied, with help from Microsoft and its PGO technology that makes Chrome's startup time around 17% faster. Chrome now loads web pages 6% faster and is 15% faster with new tab loading times.

Microsoft's PGO technology is 'Profile Guided Optimization', which measures just how users use the application, and then with this data in-hand it will re-compile an application that focuses on optimizing the most-used functions. Another feature of PGO is that it speeds apps up by keeping the most-used functions inside of the CPU's fast instruction cache.

Google took to the Chromium Blog, explaining in a new article called 'Making Chrome on Windows faster with PGO'. The team added: "To gather this data, the nightly build process now produces a special version of Chrome that tracks how often functions are used. PGO then optimizes those high-use functions for speed, in some cases increasing the binary size of those functions. To balance out that increase, PGO also optimizes less-used functions with smaller, though slightly slower code. These trade-offs result in higher overall performance, and a smaller overall code footprint".

Not only that, but "PGO also optimizes the memory location of the code, moving rarely-used functions away from frequently-used ones in memory. This results in more optimal use of the CPU instruction cache by avoiding caching of less-used code, increasing overall performance". The blog also links to many other tricks that "PGO uses to make Chrome faster, and they add up to great results".