14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is touting the latest iterations of Internet Explorer, none others than the IE 9 and IE 10 releases, as being capable of delivering the best performance in the industry.
To ensure that things are indeed so, the company designed and built the Internet Explorer Performance Lab, which is one of the most sophisticated web performance measurement systems in the world.
The IE Performance Lab has its own private network, being isolated from both the public Internet and the Microsoft intranet network, and includes over 140 machines.
In this lab, Microsoft has stacked a series of devices that are of key importance to the real Internet, including web servers, DNS servers, routers, and network emulators. Through them, the IE team can simulate different customer connectivity scenarios.
“The IE Performance Lab collects reliable, accurate, and actionable data to inform decisions throughout the development cycle,” a blog post coming from Matt Kotsenas, Jatinder Mann, and Jason Weber on the IE team explains.
“We measure the performance of Internet Explorer 200 times daily, collecting over 5.7 million measurements and 480GB of runtime data each day. We understand the impact of every change to the product and ensure that Internet Explorer only gets faster.”
The team can control all aspects of the network, including individual packet hops and latencies, thus making tests deterministic and repeatable.
“Because we’re simulating a real world setup, our lab can accommodate nearly any type of test machine or website content. The IE Performance Lab supports desktops, laptops, netbooks, and tablets with x86, x64, and ARM processors, all simultaneously,” the blog post continues.
The team uses the Windows Performance Tools (WPT) for measurements and is testing other browsers as well, along with toolbars, anti-virus products and other software.
Through WPT, the team captures high-level CPU and GPU activity, along with low-level information such as cache efficiency, and details on memory usage patterns, networking statistics, and the like.
The tool enables the measuring of performance across the stack, so that all the necessary components, such as hardware, drivers, Windows and IE, are efficiently optimized.
“A single test run takes 6 hours to complete and generates over 22GB of data during that time. This highly automated system is staffed by a small team that monitors operations, analyzes results, and develops new infrastructure features,” the blog post reads.
You can download Internet Explorer 9 from Softpedia via this link Download Internet Explorer 10