Developer builds browser-native image processing engine using Web Workers and WebAssembly

A software developer has shared a detailed breakdown of how they built a high-performance image processing pipeline that runs entirely inside the browser, without relying on a backend server. The core challenge was not image compression itself, but managing how large batches of images are processed in parallel without freezing the browser or exhausting available memory. The developer found that naively spinning up more Web Workers made performance worse, increasing CPU contention and garbage collection pressure. The solution was to treat the problem as a scheduling challenge, designing a worker pool with controlled concurrency, task prioritization, and zero-copy memory transfers using SharedArrayBuffer. The result is a browser-native engine capable of handling dozens of high-resolution images simultaneously while keeping the user interface responsive throughout.