The Chromium team has rolled out an update to Chrome for Windows that should bring a big speed boost to the browser. In build 53 for 32-bit and 54 for 64-bit, Chrome now takes advantage of Profile Guided Optimization, or PGO (pronounced Pogo) compiling to give big speed improvements. In their blog post about the update, the team reports that new tabs open 14.8% faster while Page Loads speed up by 5.9%. Not familiar with PGO? It is a compiler optimization technique that is designed to optimize performance. Specifically, Chrome looks at what functions are being used and optimizes those functions to gain the speed improvements. Essentially what it does is move rarely used functions out of memory and frequently used ones into memory.
As the Chromium team explains it.
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
Chrome Browser for Windows
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.
Browser speed and memory usage are always pillar points for browsers and Chrome for Windows is no different. Over the past few builds, memory improvements have been made (although more could be used for sure) and this addition of PGO to Chrome will help on the speed in. The good news is, if you are using Chrome on your PC, as long as you have the trains mentioned above then you have all this already installed.
For more details, check out the Chromium blog.
