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javascriptbackground-process

JavaScript: trying to create a well-behaved background job, but it gets too little time to run while rest of the system is mostly idle?

In a browser, I am trying to make a well-behaved background job like this:

function run() {
  var system = new System();
  setInterval(function() { system.step(); }, 0);
}

It doesn't matter what that System object is or what the step function does [except it needs to interact with the UI, in my case, update a canvas to run Conway's Game of Life in the background], the activity is performed slowly and I want it to run faster. But I already specified no wait time in the setInterval, and yet, when I check the profiling tool in Chrome it tells me the whole thing is 80% idle:

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Is there a way to make it do less idle time and perform my job more quickly on a best effort basis? Or do I have to make my own infinite loop and then somehow yield back time to the event loop on a regular basis?

UPDATE: It was proposed to use requestIdleCallback, and doing that makes it actually worse. The activity is noticably slower, even if the profiling data isn't very obvious about it, but indeed the idle time has increased:

enter image description here

UPDATE: It was then proposed to use requestAnimationFrame, and I find that once again the slowness and idleness is the same as the requestIdleCallback method, and both run at about half the speed that I get from the standard setInterval.

enter image description here

PS: I have updated all the timings to be comparable, all three now timing about 10 seconds of the same code running. I had the suspicion that perhaps the recursive re-scheduling might be the cause for the greater slowness, but I ruled that out, as the recursive setTimeout call is about the same speed as the setInterval method, and both are about twice as fast as these new request*Callback methods.

enter image description here

I did find a viable solution for what I'm doing in practice, and I will provide my own answer later, but will wait for a moment longer.

OK, unless somebody comes with another answer this here would be my FINAL UPDATE: I have once again measured all 4 options and measured the elapsed time to complete a reasonable chunk of work. The results are here:

  1. setTimeout - 31.056 s
  2. setInterval - 23.424 s
  3. requestIdleCallback - 68.149 s
  4. requestAnimationFrame - 68.177 s

Which provides objective data to my impression above that the two new methods with request* will perform worse.

I also have my own practical solution which allows me to complete the same amount of work in 55 ms (0.055 s), i.e., > 500 times faster, and still be relatively well behaved. Will report on that in a while. But wonder what anybody else can figure out here?

Solution

  • OK, I really am not trying to prevent others to get the bounty, but as you can see from the details I added to my question, none of these methods allow high rate execution of the callback.

    In principle the setInterval is the most efficient way to do it, as we already do not need to re-schedule the next call back all the time. But it is a small difference only. Notably requestIdleCallback and requestAnimationFrame are the worst when you want to be rapidly called back.

    So, what needs to be done is instead of executing only a tiny amount of work and then expect to be called back quickly, we need to batch up more work. Problem is we don't know exactly how much work we should batch up before it is too much. That can probably in most cases be figured out with trial and error.

    Dynamically one might take timing probes to find out how quickly we are being called back again and preemptively exit the work (loop of some kind) when the time between the call-backs is expired.