Version 2.0 of Google's benchmarking suite includes measures for reducing latency, new benchmarks that target use cases like asm.js and updates to existing benchmarks.

As we reported when it was originally released in August 2012, Octane 2.0 is a modern benchmark that measures a JavaScript engine’s performance by running a wide range of tests designed to be more representative of today’s complex and demanding web applications. It is an extension to the original V8 benchmark and its goal is to measure the performance of JavaScript code found in large, real-world web applications, running on modern mobile and desktop browsers.  

The updated Octane 2.0 benchmark includes four new tests to measure new aspects of JavaScript performance. With the focus in the new version on reducing compiler and garbage latency, two of the new tests, MandreelLatency and SplayLatency are extensions of existing tests instrumented so that they now produce latency scores, as well as speed scores.

Octane 2.0 also adds a zlib test to measure how VMs perform on asm.js-like code, which is taken directly from the zlib sample code from Mozilla's Emscripten test suite. There's also a Typecript test derived from Microsoft's compiler that measures how fast TypeScript compiles itself.

Several existing tests have been fixed:

• GameBoy: part of the code was supposed to run in strict mode, but it didn't. Now it does. A bug that led to excessive out-of-bounds memory accesses in a TypedArray was also fixed.
  
  
• Regexp: eliminated the possibility of caching some results.
  
  
• CodeLoad: improved the cache busting measures by using a true hash function.
  
  
• DeltaBlue and NavierStokes: minor bug fixes that don't change the overall execution profile.