We switched adblock lists to be served as plaintext components rather than serialized DATs in https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/15077. Loading adblock lists from plaintext is slightly slower than loading from a serialized DAT, although it leaves us the option of serializing them clientside to the newer uncompressed format which can be deserialized significantly faster. As per https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/15077:
Performance analysis
Benchmarking adblock-rust on my own computer shows a minor perf impact related to list parsing at startup, of an additional ~56ms or 32% regression for the entire set of default lists. Note that an additional change can allow adblock-rust to cache compiled DATs in uncompressed format after updates, resulting in a significant improvement to engine load time over the current master branch. I've left the caching for a followup to minimize the number of changes in this PR.
The benchmark results below show the engine load times for the current master configuration, the configuration as of this PR, and the configuration with caching, respectively (middle time value is average).
from_dat time: [173.66 ms 174.88 ms 176.32 ms]
from_plaintext time: [228.08 ms 230.97 ms 233.52 ms]
from_uncompressed_dat time: [46.191 ms 46.777 ms 47.546 ms]
Brave should create a cached adblock DAT whenever lists are modified, and load this on startup to reduce load at browser-launch. Also, there is currently no code in place to prevent pages from loading before the adblock engines are ready, so this is important to help ads be caught on startup.
cuba
commented
6 months ago
We switched adblock lists to be served as plaintext components rather than serialized DATs in https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/15077. Loading adblock lists from plaintext is slightly slower than loading from a serialized DAT, although it leaves us the option of serializing them clientside to the newer uncompressed format which can be deserialized significantly faster. As per https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/15077:
Brave should create a cached adblock DAT whenever lists are modified, and load this on startup to reduce load at browser-launch. Also, there is currently no code in place to prevent pages from loading before the adblock engines are ready, so this is important to help ads be caught on startup.