Hit the Ground Running: Wasm Snapshots for Fast Start Up
I gave a (virtual) talk at the WebAssembly Summit this year titled “Hit the Ground Running: Wasm Snapshots for Fast Start Up”. Here is the talk’s abstract:
Don’t make your users wait while your Wasm module initializes itself! Wizer instantiates your WebAssembly module, executes its initialization functions, and then snapshots the initialized state out into a new, pre-initialized WebAssembly module. Now you can use this new module to hit the ground running, without waiting for any of that first-time initialization code to complete. This talk will cover the design and implementation of Wizer; discuss its performance characteristics and the scenarios in which it excels and when it isn’t the right tool; and finally, in the process of doing all that, we’ll take a closer look at what makes up the guts of a WebAssembly module: memories, globals, tables, etc.
You can view the slide deck here, check out the benchmarks here, and the recording is embedded below: