Flash, Silverlight and JavaScript Performance

Here is an interesting head to head performance comparison of Flash and Silverlight:

http://www.itwriting.com/primetest/index.html

 

Both grind thru a less than optimal algorithm for finding a bunch of prime numbers.

Code is provided in another link so that you can see that it is apples to apples in terms of the code implemented.

 

On my machine, I saw an over two one advantage for Silverlight. Silverlight ran 1M prime checks in .8892285 seconds and Flash took 2.153 seconds for the same. This ratio held up over a range of values:

 

Number	Flash	Silverlight	Ratio
1 M	2.153	0.8892285	2.42119995
2 M	5.477	2.3092736	2.371741486
3 M	9.627	4.056832	2.373033934
4 M	14.324	6.0697226	2.359910155
5 M	19.692	8.3445947	2.359850982
6 M	25.895	10.802571	2.397114539
7 M	31.773	13.3872827	2.373371857
8 M	38.599	16.1520106	2.389733449
9 M	45.238	19.0887398	2.369878812

 

Another individual, Tobin Harris no doubt, has provided a JavaScript implementation at:

http://www.tobinharris.com/primes.html

 

It took 54 seconds for the 1M to run in JavaScript. But this result had to be thrown out because IE was constantly popping up a dialog asking if the JavaScript should be terminated. Although that is a lesson in and of itself that JavaScript running loose in the browser will face ever increasing scrutiny that diminishes it's usefulness.