V8 in MongoDB

Those two follow node.js releases closely may have noticed that version 0.10 has taken a very long time to release, as contributions stagnated. Unable to follow Chrome's short release cycles, it stayed with a V8 version 3.14 that quickly became outdated. Fortunately, io.js was able to pick up the pace and now closely follows V8's releases.

A less well-known issue is MongoDB. Two years ago, MongoDB switched to V8 for its Javascript VM (from previously SpiderMonkey). However, that's where they stayed. Two years later, MongoDB is still using V8 3.12. There have been efforts to update to version 3.25, but seems to have been given up.

The issue seems to be that MongoDB expects V8 to handle out of memory situations more gracefully, but instead, as a result of architectural changes and bug fixes, V8 does not attempt to recover and intentionally crashes.

Given that V8 3.12 is now three years old, I wish something could be done here. Of course the Javascript code run on MongoDB are usually server-side, but given three years of security issues being fixed, I wouldn't be surprised if there are some exploits.

There is a bright counter-example: plv8 is very up-to-date as we speak, using V8 4.3, which is currently the most recent stable branch.

Improving V8's performance using the serializer/deserializer

V8 has long been using so-called snapshots to improve start-up time. By capturing a snapshot of a fresh V8 instance, initializing Javascript globals no longer require executing native scripts where they are defined, but simply deserializing the snapshot. A d8 shell built with snapshot starts within 15ms as opposed to 55ms without.

A minor sometimes overlooked detail is that the snapshot not only speeds up creating a V8 isolate via v8::Isolate::New, but also contexts created via v8::Context::New, as the snapshot is used as a template.

Recently, the serializer and deserializer implementing the start-up snapshot have been improved to support new features. In the following I want to give a brief introduction to two new embedder-facing APIs that - if used correctly - can improve performance significantly.