All About Performance Taras' blog on Snappy, Startup, Telemetry and other Firefox peroformance matters

Misc

This was an unusual meeting for the Snappy project: everybody was in the same physical room (though someone dialed in 5min before the end). I love the distributed nature of Mozilla, but it’s nice to have everybody in the same room for a change.

Vlad did some super-slow-startup investigation. We have even more evidence that loading pages before the UI is up is a bad idea: bug 715402.

Jet sped up browser chrome by converting SVG masks to clip-paths: bug 752918. With a name like that, how can he not work on performance bugs

The necko team is looking for feedback on test builds that reduce cache-related pauses on the main thread. If you suffer from cache-related lag, give these a spin: bug 722034.

Benoit made our profiling builds useful on Linux, Android (in addition to Windows, Mac64). Work is happening on extending our debug protocol with profiling abilities. Unfortunately I do not have bug #s to link to. The Windows symbol server is almost done with security review so it can be exposed to the web. For more profiler details see bugs: 753588, 751355, 751355, 751034, 751779.

Rafael is getting close to calling exit(0) in bug 662444. Much work remains, it’ll be the most significant change since we embarked on this project almost a year ago. Our current application shutdown situation is not pretty.

GC/CC

Bill landed incremental GC again, it promptly bounced out: bug 735099.

We now do compartmental GC more often: bug 716014.

Andrew is working on reducing CC overhead (by 80% in his benchmark) when closing tabs: bug 754495.

LagBlock Plus

I’ve been running Wlad’s extension for over a week now. The browser is so much more pleasant now. Background tabs used to make text-entry a painful process. Can’t wait until we can approach a similar level of responsiveness by scheduling background tab events more intelligently.

I feel that letting tabs run out of control is a serious misfeature in the current web ‘architecture’. Modern OSes require background apps to suspend (ie Android, iOS). It is about time that browsers forced a similar behavior: ie bug 675539. Web developers should be given a way to request to run background tasks and users should be able to veto that.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2012 at 11:10 am and is filed under snappy. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.