TWebBrowser control slow performance only in Delphi

Question

Can someone explain me why TWebBrowser control is working so slow on all XE editions of Delphi including XE5 and possibly XE6? To test this you need to create a new Delphi project and put TWebBrowser control in it. On form show event, navigate to this website:

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/setImmediateSorting/Default.html

Please test this on Windows 7 or later. When navigation is complete, run setImmediate test and watch the results. It will take huge amount of time to complete the test. It will take about a minute to finish this.

When you open true Internet Explorer browser and do the same thing - test will be completed instantly (~200 miliseconds).

Some additional wierd informations:

When you recreate this procedure on old versions of Delphi (Delphi 7 to be precise) the web-control works as fast as it should be working and test is completed instantly. But the HTML5 speed test will still works slow (alternative test on this page).

Another weird thing is, the same slow behavior can be seen on C++ Builder but not in Visual Studio products. Is Microsoft deliberately slowing down the TWebBorwser in Embarcadero products?? I can't belive this.

I was trying to overcome this problem with diffrent methods such as:

1. Trying different feature options in registry such as: FEATURE_GPU_RENDERING, FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION (11001), FEATURE_ALIGNED_TIMERS (undocumented option), FEATURE_ALLOW_HIGHFREQ_TIMER (undocumented option),

2. Setting timerBeginPeriod(1) - no effect.

Please, if someone have any clue how to fix this issue - share this information with me.

UPDATE1 I made standalone test app if anyone cares. It can be downloaded here: http://mp.org.pl/download/ietest.zip It contains source and exe app with htm file. HTM file contains some js procedure that works 10 times faster in standalone IE than in TWebBrowser control. It uses setImmediate as a test (the same procedure used in test described above). But it can be easier for testing this way.

Answer 1

I can also see the behavior described (in your original post and in the comments). I have a few thoughts, but not necessarily an answer.

One should expect some difference in performance between the WebBrowser control and IE, in part because your Delphi app will need to build in support for certain features/APIs that IE supports out of the box.

For example, the WebBrowser control fires notifications related to tabbed browsing (old, but relevant), but it does not intrinsically handle those notifications or update the UI. You have to respond to the notifications and draw the tabs yourself. By default, IE is hardware accelerated and uses certain Windows APIs that may not be directly supported by Delphi's VCL (for resource/performance) reasons. (Hardware acceleration could account for some of the performance differences you've noticed.)

(And, for the record, I don't believe a list of differences between IE and the WebBrowser control was ever documented. I certainly don't remember seeing one in the portfolio.)

Also, the default values for various feature controls vary between IE and applications hosting the WebBrowser control. Part of the reason for this stems from the idea that IE needs to highlight performance over compatibility whereas applications generally need to emphasize compatibility over performance. You may wish to review the feature control reference to see if there are other FCKs you need to enable for your app.

Second, your loops are very tight, perhaps too tight. You've got one request piling on earlier requests and you're not really leaving much room for processing, even with setImmediate. (IIRC, we're not really supposed to use anything smaller than 250ms for setInterval without risking performance hits from the sheer number of requests.) The remarks in the setImmdiate ref. page provide some guidance, as does this article on requestAnimationFrame.

One reason why dragging the window appears to improve performance may due to the priority of window drag repaint requests. They may be forcing your loops to hold long enough (or even break) to allow other events to process. Hard to say without with tracing the system with a debugger.

Have you ever had to add application.processMessages() to your Delphi apps in order to allow the system a chance to handle the work you've already assigned? A similar need may be coming into play given the nature of your test.

Performance testing and timing is a tricky thing. You need to make sure the test isn't imposing so much overhead that it interferes with the actual work you're trying to perform.

Finally, there were some questions about the document mode of the page as it's loaded into your project. When I first started messing around with your sample, I couldn't get project4 to load slowtest.html in anything other than IE5 quirks mode (notoriously slow). Here's what eventually started working for me:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<!-- saved from url=(0023)http://www.contoso.com/ --> 
<html>
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"/>
  <script type="text/javascript">
  ...

(Note, I deleted your initial doctype declaration and rewrite it to resolve a syntax error that was being reported by the F12 tools debugger.)

A few style key points here:

• I used a mark of the web to load the page in the Internet zone. I find this makes it easier to load the page in edge mode, as pages in the intranet zone are loaded in compatibility view by default (unless you map the zones differently).

• The x-ua-compatible header needs to be one of the first in the head block. It can follow title, but not much else.

• Stylistically, elements need to be specified in lower case these days. There's a possibility that not following the current conventions forces the parser to fall back to an earlier rendering that supports the conventions.

Once I was able to control the documentMode at runtime, I found results I expected: older document modes ran more slowly. I also found that using requestAnimationFrame instead of setImmediate led to even better performance, but also surfaced the timing issue almost immediately.

In the end, this may be a case where the test highlights a problem, but not necessarily one you're trying to solve. (Insert Inigo meme here.) I get that you're trying to resolve a bottleneck. Are you sure you've found the correct bottleneck?

You may not be able to replicate the same performance of the native browser, but perhaps you can refactor the code to perform adequately without the extra overhead? Is there anything that might be better handled with a worker or some other implementation technique?

Hope this helps...