i couldn't agree with you more. competition will sort all this ugliness out in the medium to long term. today's web applications are so complex with so many mov

i couldn't agree with you more. competition will sort all this ugliness out in the medium to long term. today's web applications are so complex with so many moving pieces that bounding performance to any reasonable range is becoming more and more difficult. i'm pretty sure amazons dynamo paper has been mentioned here on more than one occasion although it does not speak to javascript performance specifically. what it does do is attack the problem of bounded performance in their space, but may be abstracted in general. the paper talks at length about specific issues in their problem space but takes an overarching approach to isolating performance bottlenecks and ensuring performance at a finally granulated level. i think the way that the dynamo paper attacks the larger problem by breaking it down into its constituent parts and then ensuring bounds on those subsections has value in this discussion and beyond. no doubt a great way to ensure overall performance is to strongly decouple constituent parts and ensure tight performance bounds on those parts which you have greatest control. in total, you will be able to predict with more confidence a performance range that you may feel comfortable with.