About two years ago, I joined the performance test team to help build PerfCompare, an improved performance tool designed to replace Perfherder’s Compare View. Around that time, we introduced PerfCompare to garner enthusiasm and feedback in creating a new workflow that would reduce the cognitive load and confusion of its predecessor. And, if we’re being honest, a tool that would also be more enjoyable from a design perspective for comparing the results of performance tests. But most importantly, we wanted to add new, relevant features while keeping Firefox engineers foremost in mind.
Started from the bottom… PerfCompare’s first home page
Now, after working with Senior Product Designer Dasha Andriyenko to create a sleek, intuitive UI/UX, integrating feedback from engineers and leaders across different teams, and achieving key milestones, we’re excited to announce that PerfCompare is live and ready to use at perf.compare.
Now we’re on top! PerfCompare today!
Time to celebrate! 🎉
PerfCompare’s ultimate purpose is to become a tool that empowers developers to make performance testing a core part of their development process.
We are targeting the end of this year to deprecate Compare View and make PerfCompare the primary tool to help Firefox developers analyze the performance impact of their patches.
We are in the process of updating the Firefox source docs, but documentation for PerfCompare can be found at PerfCompare Documentation. It provides details on all the new features currently available on PerfCompare and instructions on how to use the tool.
Some key highlights regarding features include:
- Allowing comparisons of up to three new revisions/patches versus the base revision of a repository (mozilla-central, autoland, etc.)
- Searching revisions by short hash, long hash, or author email
- A more visible and separate workflow for comparing revisions over time
- Editing the compared revisions on the results page to compute new comparisons for an updated results table without having to return to the home page
- Expanded rows in the results table with graphs for the base and new revisions
And there’s much more in the works!
I’d like to extend a huge congratulations to the performance test team, Dasha, and everyone who has contributed feedback and suggestions to our user research, team meetings, and presentations. We owe PerfCompare’s launch and continued improvement to you!
If you have any questions or comments about PerfCompare, you can find us in the #PerfCompare matrix channel or join our #PerfCompareUserResearch channel. If you experience any issues, please report them on Bugzilla.
No comments yet
Comments are closed, but trackbacks are open.