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Exploring the XPRT white paper library

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on July 20, 2023

As part of our commitment to publishing reliable, unbiased benchmarks, we strive to make the XPRT development process as transparent as possible. In the technology assessment industry, it’s not unusual for people to claim that any given benchmark contains hidden biases, so we take preemptive steps to address this issue by publishing XPRT benchmark source code, detailed system disclosures and test methodologies, and in-depth white papers. Today, we’re focusing on the XPRT white paper library.

The XPRT white paper library currently contains 21 white papers that we’ve published over the last 12 years. We started publishing white papers to provide XPRT users with more information about how we design our benchmarks, why we make certain development decisions, and how the benchmarks work. If you have questions about any aspect of one of the XPRT benchmarks, the white paper library is a great place to find some answers.

For example, the Exploring WebXPRT 4 white paper describes the design and structure of WebXPRT 4, including detailed information about the benchmark’s harness, HTML5 and WebAssembly (WASM) capability checks, and the structure of the performance test workloads. It also includes explanations of the benchmark’s scoring methodology, how to automate tests, and how to submit results for publication.

The companion WebXPRT 4 results calculation white paper explains the formulas that WebXPRT 4 uses to calculate the individual workload scenario scores and overall score, provides an overview of the statistical techniques WebXPRT uses to translate raw timings into scores, and explains the benchmark’s confidence interval and how it differs from typical benchmark variability. To supplement the white paper’s discussion of the results calculation process, we published a results calculation spreadsheet that shows the raw data from a sample test run and reproduces the exact calculations WebXPRT uses to produce test scores.

We hope that the XPRT white paper library will prove to be a useful resource for you. If you have questions about any of our white papers, or suggestions for topics that you’d like us to cover in possible future white papers, please let us know!

Justin

Posted in benchmark, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, HTML5, WebAssembly, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 4, White papers | Also tagged , , , , , ,

Celebrating 10 years of WebXPRT!

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on March 30, 2023

We’re excited to announce that it’s been 10 years since the initial launch of WebXPRT! In early 2013, we introduced WebXPRT as a unique browser performance benchmark in a market space that was already crowded with a variety of specialized measurement tools. Our goal was to offer a benchmark that could compare the performance of almost any web-enabled device, using scenarios created to mirror real-world tasks. We wanted it to be a free, easily accessible, easy-to-run, useful, and appealing testing option for OEM labs, vendors, and the tech press.

When we look back on the last 10 years of WebXPRT, we can’t help but conclude that our efforts have been successful. Since those early days, the WebXPRT market presence has grown from humble beginnings into a worldwide industry standard. Hundreds of tech press publications have used WebXPRT in thousands of articles and reviews, and testers have now run the benchmark well over 1.1 million times.

Below, I’ve listed some of the WebXPRT team’s accomplishments over the last decade. If you’ve been following WebXPRT from the beginning, this may all be familiar, but if you’re new to the  community, it may be interesting to see some of the steps that contributed to making WebXPRT what it is today.

In future blog posts, we’ll look at how the number of WebXPRT runs has grown over time, and how WebXPRT use has grown among OEMs, vendors, and the tech press worldwide. Do you have any thoughts that you’d like to share from your WebXPRT testing experience? If so, let us know!

Justin

Posted in benchmark, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, Browser-based benchmarks, Cross-platform benchmarks, German, History of benchmarking, JavaScript, Performance benchmarking, results, Simplified Chinese, tech press, WebAssembly, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2013, WebXPRT 2015, WebXPRT 3, WebXPRT 4, WebXPRT Processor Comparison Chart, White papers | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Exploring WebXPRT 4 white paper is now available

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on September 1, 2022

This week, we published the Exploring WebXPRT 4 white paper. It describes the design and structure of WebXPRT 4, including detailed information about the benchmark’s harness, HTML5 and WebAssembly (WASM) capability checks, and changes we’ve made to the structure of the performance test workloads. We explain the benchmark’s scoring methodology, how to automate tests, and how to submit results for publication. The white paper also includes information about the third-party functions and libraries that WebXPRT 4 uses during the HTML5 and WASM capability checks and performance workloads.

The Exploring WebXPRT 4 white paper promotes the high level of transparency and disclosure that is a core value of the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community. We’ve always believed that transparency builds trust, and trust is essential for a healthy benchmarking community. That’s why we involve community members in the benchmark development process and disclose how we build our benchmarks and how they work.

You can find the paper on WebXPRT.com and our XPRT white papers page. If you have any questions about WebXPRT 4, please let us know, and be sure to check out our other XPRT white papers.

Justin

Posted in Automation, benchmark, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Performance benchmarking, results, results submission, WebAssembly, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 3, WebXPRT 4, White papers | Also tagged , , , , , , , ,

WebXPRT 4 is live!

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on February 28, 2022

We’re excited to announce that WebXPRT 4 is now available! Testers can access the benchmark at WebXPRT.com. If you’ve already been using the WebXPRT 4 Preview, your Preview test results will be comparable with results from the current official build.

Longtime WebXPRT users will notice that WebXPRT 4 has a new, but familiar, UI. The general process for kicking off both manual and automated tests is the same as with WebXPRT 3, so the transition from WebXPRT 3 to WebXPRT 4 testing should be straightforward. We will continue to make WebXPRT 3 available for legacy testing.

If you missed earlier XPRT blog posts about WebXPRT 4, here is a quick overview of the differences between WebXPRT 3 and WebXPRT 4:

General changes

  • We’ve updated the aesthetics of the WebXPRT UI to make WebXPRT 4 visually distinct from older versions. We did not significantly change the flow of the UI.
  • We’ve updated content in some of the workloads to reflect changes in everyday technology, such as upgrading most of the photos in the photo processing workloads to higher resolutions.
  • We’ve updated the base calibration system for score calculations, and adjusted the scoring scale. WebXPRT 4 scores should not be compared to scores from previous versions of WebXPRT.

Workload changes

  • Photo Enhancement. We increased the efficiency of the workload’s Canvas object creation function, and replaced the existing photos with new, higher-resolution photos.
  • Organize Album Using AI. We replaced ConvNetJS with WebAssembly (WASM) based OpenCV.js for both the face detection and image classification tasks. We changed the images for the image classification tasks to images from the ImageNet dataset.
  • Stock Option Pricing. We updated the dygraph.js library.
  • Sales Graphs. We made no changes to this workload.
  • Encrypt Notes and OCR Scan. We replaced ASM.js with WASM for the Notes task and updated the WASM-based Tesseract version for the OCR task.
  • Online Homework. In addition to the existing scenario which uses four Web Workers, we have added a scenario with two Web Workers. The workload now covers a wider range of Web Worker performance, and we calculate the score by using the combined run time of both scenarios. We also updated the typo.js library.

We’re thankful for all of the feedback we received during the WebXPRT 4 development process, and we look forward to seeing your WebXPRT 4 results!

Justin

Posted in benchmark, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, Browser-based benchmarks, Cross-platform benchmarks, Performance benchmarking, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 3, webxprt 4 | Also tagged , , , , ,

A clearer picture of WebXPRT 4

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on October 7, 2021

The WebXPRT 4 development process is far enough along that we’d like to share more about changes we are likely to make and a rough target date for publishing a preview build. While some of the details below will probably change, this post should give readers a good sense of what to expect.

General changes

Some of the non-workload changes in WebXPRT 4 relate to our typical benchmark update process, and a few result directly from feedback we received from the WebXPRT tech press survey.

  • We will update the aesthetics of the WebXPRT UI to make WebXPRT 4 visually distinct from older versions. We do not anticipate significantly changing the flow of the UI.
  • We will update content in some of the workloads to reflect changes in everyday technology. For instance, we will upgrade most of the photos in the photo processing workloads to higher resolutions.
  • In response to a request from tech press survey respondents, we are considering adding a looping function to the automation scripts.
  • We are investigating the possibility of shortening the benchmark by reducing the default number of iterations from seven to five. We will only make this change if we can ensure that five iterations produce consistently low score variance.

Changes to existing workloads

  • Photo Enhancement. This workload applies three effects to two photos each (six photos total). It tests HTML5 Canvas, Canvas 2D, and JavaScript performance. The only change we are considering is adding higher-resolution photos.
  • Organize Album Using AI. This workload currently uses the ConvNetJS neural network library to complete two tasks: (1) organizing five images and (2) classifying the five images in an album. We are planning to replace ConvNetJS with WebAssembly (WASM) for both tasks and are considering upgrading the images to higher resolutions.
  • Stock Option Pricing. This workload calculates and displays graphic views of a stock portfolio using Canvas, SVG, and dygraph.js. The only change we are considering is combining it with the Sales Graphs workload (below).
  • Sales Graphs. This workload provides a web-based application displaying multiple views of sales data. Sales Graphs exercises HTML5 Canvas and SVG performance. The only change we are considering is combining it with the Stock Option Pricing workload (above).
  • Encrypt Notes and OCR Scan. This workload uses ASM.js to sync notes, extract text from a scanned receipt using optical character recognition (OCR), and add the scanned text to a spending report. We are planning to replace ASM.js with WASM for the Notes task and with WASM-based Tesseract for the OCR task.
  • Online Homework. This workload uses regex, arrays, strings, and Web Workers to review DNA and spell-check an essay. We are not planning to change this workload.

Possible new workloads

  • Natural Language Processing (NLP). We are considering the addition of an NLP workload using ONNX Runtime and/or TensorFlowJS. The workload would use Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to answer questions about a given text. Similar use cases are becoming more prevalent in conversational bot systems, domain-specific document search tools, and various other educational applications.
  • Message Scrolling. We are considering developing a new workload that would use an Angular or React.js to scroll through hundreds of messages. We’ll share more about this possible workload as we firm up the details.

The release timeline

We hope to publish a WebXPRT 4 preview build in the second half of November, with a general release before the end of the year. If it looks as though that timeline will change significantly, we’ll provide an update here in the blog as soon as possible.

We’re very grateful for all the input we received during the WebXPRT 4 planning process. If you have any questions about the details we’ve shared above, please feel free to ask!

Justin

Posted in benchmark, Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, Browser-based benchmarks, Collaborative benchmark development, Cross-platform benchmarks, Future of performance evaluation, HTML5, image classification, image processing, Performance benchmarking, Web-based testing, WebAssembly, WebXPRT, webxprt 4 | Also tagged , , ,

Round 2 of the WebXPRT 4 survey is now open

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on July 22, 2021

In May, we surveyed longtime WebXPRT users regarding the types of changes they would like to see in a WebXPRT 4. We sent the survey to journalists at several tech press outlets, and invited our blog readers to participate as well. We received some very helpful feedback. As we explore new possibilities for WebXPRT 4, we’ve decided to open an updated version of the survey. We’ve adjusted the questions a bit based on previous feedback and added some new ones, so we invite you to respond even if you participated in the original survey.

To do so, please send your answers to the following questions to benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com before July 31.

  • Do you think WebXPRT 3’s selection of workload scenarios is representative of modern web tasks?
  • How do you think WebXPRT compares to other common browser-based benchmarks, such as JetStream, Speedometer, and Octane?
  • Would you like to see a workload based on WebAssembly (WASM) in WebXPRT 4? Why or why not?
  • Would you like to see a workload based on Single Page Application (SPA) technology in WebXPRT 4? Why or why not?
  • Would you like to see a workload based on Motion UI in WebXPRT 4? Why or why not?
  • Would you like to see us include any other web technologies in additional workloads?
  • Are you happy with the WebXPRT 3 user interface? If not, what UI changes would you like to see?
  • Have you ever experienced significant connection issues when testing with WebXPRT?
  • Given its array of workloads, do you think the WebXPRT runtime is reasonable? Would you mind if the average runtime increased slightly?
  • Would you like to see us change any other aspects of WebXPRT 3?


If you would like to share your thoughts on any topics that the questions above do not cover, please include those in your response. We look forward to hearing from you!

Justin

Posted in benchmark, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, Browser-based benchmarks, Collaborative benchmark development, Future of performance evaluation, JetStream, Motion UI, Octane, Single Page Application, Speedometer, Web-based testing, WebAssembly, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 3, webxprt 4, What makes a good benchmark? | Also tagged , , , , , , ,

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