Firefox Startup Performance Weekly Summary
Recent activity:
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An improvement in startup time on Mac Leopard of around ~16% (aka: Very Large) was found by Joel Reymont and fixed by Masayuki Nakano in bug 517549. Mac users rejoice!
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The Windows cold startup regression from 3.5 to 3.6 being tracked in bug 517741. Help finding the window for this would be awesome.
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JAR Performance: Alfred Kayser has a new patch on bug 510844 which should increase throughput of JAR file reading, about ready to land.
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Ben Hsieh is making progress removing the needless stats of already-fastloaded components and other stat removals in bug 511761.
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Service caching work is still in progress in bug 516085. Drew's tests showed no significant win on Tp, but the patch did reduce IO service retrievals by 58%. It might be worth pushing this to the Places branch to get a better idea of the total performance impact of the change.
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Ryan Flint landed bug 499123, combining a bunch of about: pages into a single component, on 1.9.2 branch for Firefox 3.6.
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Bookmarks toolbar: I put a patch on bug 504858 that pushes back the population of the toolbar until after the browser window comes up. Checking into the Places branch showed a 1.5% improvement to warm startup on Windows. Just waiting on review.
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CSS Parsing Time: Zack is working on major CSS parser changes in bug 513149. Projects in a holding pattern:
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Preference Files: Taras Glek has been working on combining the different preference files into a single one at build time, in bug 507288. The patch is there, and is just trying to find a way to land cleanly.
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Cold Startup Testing: Drew and Alice made a bunch of progress on bug 510587, to create a new Ts that measures cold startup. Alice is working on mobile Talos though, so this is sidelined for a bit. The only issue left is reliable Windows measurement, but we're not going to block on it, can live with Mac and Linux to start off.
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JARification: David abandoned moving JS modules into a JAR file, since those files are fastloaded. However, since we want things like post-extension-install restarts to be fast, and those cause fastload cache invalidation, we might want to do things like this anyways. I filed a bug for the same treatment for components. These are lower priority, since they're not the normal startup case. Follow along with all JAR-ification via the tracker bug.
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Startup Timeline: No updates, still not landed. Add [ft] in the whiteboard of your bug w/ the function names you want timed and David will generate it and update the bug.
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PGO for Places, mozStorage and SQLite: Still blocking on Rel-Eng fixing bug 486783, which now has patches!
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Static Analysis: No progress on bug 506128. David needs to file a bug with the final log of named-yet-uncalled functions.
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Dirty Profile Testing: No progress. Need to list scenarios, file bugs for each, generate Talos config patches and profile data, and then move it into Rel-Eng territory. Also, need to get a separate Tinderbox tree, since it's going to cause a bazillion new columns.
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Joel Reymont noted in bug 513076 that there are serious drawbacks to getting our libraries in the dyld shared cache on Mac, so has deprioritized that work.