1887997 - URL.searchParams performance issue

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Networking, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Matt Cowley [:MattIPv4]]

Steps to reproduce:

👋 It seems that SpiderMonkey suffers from the same performance issue that I fixed in Node.js (https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/51520), where repeat writes to URL.searchParams trigger URL to re-parse the params on every write, leading to a performance bottleneck.

// Will lock up the browser
const params = new URL('https://mozilla.org').searchParams;
for (let i = 0; i < 100_000; i++) params.append('test', i.toString());

// Will run without issue
const params = new URLSearchParams();
for (let i = 0; i < 100_000; i++) params.append('test', i.toString());

I suspect a patch similar to what I landed in Node.js, where URL is lazily updated if searchParams has changed the next time a getter is called, rather than immediately updating URL when searchParams changes, would fix it.

Actual results:

Browser locks up when writing repeatedly in excess to URL.searchParams.

Expected results:

There should be no substantial performance overhead for using URL.searchParams compared to URLSearchParams.

Comment 1

[Mayank Bansal]

Can repro the slowdown : https://share.firefox.dev/3xbZ5pz
But even Chrome is slow here.

Comment 2

[Mayank Bansal]

Attachment: OPs testcase.html

Comment 3

[Matt Cowley [:MattIPv4]]

Yeah, all major JS runtimes seem to suffer from the same issue, as this implementation is what most folks land on based on the wording of the spec. The fix I landed in Node.js seems to be spec-compliant still, just a bit more convoluted in how the updates propagate to avoid the performance penalty. I've filed https://issues.chromium.org/issues/331406951 + https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271735 for the same.

Comment 4

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

This has nothing to do with JS runtimes. All the time is spent inside the native implementation.

Comment 5

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Now, a question is, why would anyone add so many params? The testcase feels rather artificial micro-benchmark.
Are there use cases when thousands of entries are needed?

Comment 6

[Matt Cowley [:MattIPv4]]

I ran into the slowdown in the wild while investigating a bug report in one of our sites, for a couple thousand query params on a URL we were generating. Investigated further and realised there was this substantial performance difference between URL.searchParams and URLSearchParams. Agree I don't think there is a "proper" test case for this -- when I submitted the patch into Node.js, I just added a benchmark to compare the performance of URL.searchParams and URLSearchParams at 1k and 1m query params. This is definitely more a performance enhancement than it is a "bug" per se.

Comment 7

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin] (he/him)]

I think the problem is that for URLSearchParams we just append a new entry in the array, but for URL('https://mozilla.org').searchParams we also need to update the URL href - which tends to reallocate a large string every time.

Comment 8

[Matt Cowley [:MattIPv4]]

Valentin, yes indeed, every time URL.searchParams is updated, a stringified version of the params is sent back to the URL, which is then re-parsed, as I understand it. The fix I made in Node.js was to set a flag on URL indicating that URL.searchParams had updated, and then on the next read/write to URL itself, the stringified params from URL.searchParams would be fetched and parsed. That means the stringification/parsing only happens once for a set of URL.searchParams changes, rather than for each change.

Comment 9

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

Perf impact is low, since this isn't hit often (probably very rarely).