Google Chrome will solve performance problem by increasing browser cache size

According to the latest report, Google Chrome browser developers have recently solved a security problem by partitioning the browser cache by website instead of a single unified heap.

Google Chrome engineers Josh Karlin and Shivani Sharma explained the problem of unified caching.

“This opens the door to side-channel attacks for browsers. One website can detect whether another website has loaded resources by checking whether there are resources in the cache. This sounds harmless, but it can be used to do a lot. Evil actions, such as discovering your inbox, content in your contacts, etc.”

Since Chrome 85, the browser has been creating a cache of specific websites, and other websites cannot interact with it. Unfortunately, this brings a performance impact.

“The early (Canary/dev) results of using top-frame-site showed that the impact was not as serious as the worry. The cache hit rate dropped by about 4%, but the change to the first rich paint is statistically It’s not significant, and the overall score of bytes loaded from the cache only dropped from 39.1% to 37.8%.” Google engineers said, “As we move to the beta and stable versions, this situation may change, but This seems to be an encouraging start.”

Google is seeking to alleviate this situation by expanding the size of specific site caches.

“Now the cache will be partitioned, and it makes sense to see if increasing the cache size helps offset some of the performance impacts by reducing the eviction rate,” Sharma said in a Chrome Gerrit post.

Google is planning to experiment with Canary, Beta, and Dev build users to expand the browser opportunities of specific sites to between 2 to 3 times the usual size. This should increase the cache hit rate and improve load time. This test has not yet been approved, but it should be rolled out to testers soon.

(Source)