Our application initially starts off as as single IE window. However, when a user clicks a button, one or more additional windows are opened from the original window using window.open(). Performance is very critical to us. I have noticed that opening additional windows using window.open does not increase the IE process count, where opening a new IE browser instance from the Task Bar does.
Without getting into too much detail, our application makes significant use of ActiveX controls to, manage the open window's z-level among all OS windows, perform IPC between the JavaScript code and desktop applications. I am looking for guidance on how to construct this multi-IE-window application to best make use of multiple cores, processes, and threads. It seems that when using window.open() all JavaScript execution and rendering on all windows takes place on a single thread. What can we do to increase performance? At this point we are considering, as an alternative to window.open(), using ActiveX to launch a new IE process and then using our ActiveX based IPC logic to communicate between instances.
P.S. Please don't bother bashing this design. It's a radiology viewing application that runs on high-end multi-monitor workstations.