Engineering team cuts browser video renderer frame time by 80% with single commit

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A browser-based video rendering engine was producing frames at roughly one per second for a 1,050-frame, 1080p export — far below expected performance given the hardware involved. Profiling revealed four distinct bottlenecks: unnecessary UI overlay processing during export, repeated WebGL context destruction and shader recompilation for animated layers, a flawed cache key that forced full DOM re-rasterization on every frame even for simple opacity changes, and a fourth related pipeline inefficiency. Engineers resolved all four issues in a single commit, introducing fixes such as an export mode flag, a small LRU compositor pool, and a smarter cache key that excluded animation-only properties like opacity. Frame time medians dropped from roughly 0.5–1.0 seconds to 90–165ms, representing an approximately 80% reduction. A pixel-level verification pass confirmed output remained visually identical, though it also surfaced a previously undetected rendering bug in the process.

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