Firefox Startup Performance Weekly Summary
The numbers aren't updated yet, as they were oddly counter-intuitive. Firefox 3.5 showed a massive week-over-week improvement in cold startup on Windows, which from what I can tell is not expected. On Leopard, cold startup shows a couple of percentage point improvement over last week, which is expected. Warm startup for Mac shows a 20% improvement over 3.5, but a 10% regression from last week, contradicting the numbers from Ts. Again, counter-intuitive numbers given that we landed a bunch of changes focused squarely on startup performance during that period.
Fortuitously, Alice and the release engineering team deployed automated cold startup testing for Mac and Linux. This gives us per-checkin visibility of cold startup times, and removes the need for error-prone local measurements for those platforms. On Windows we haven't yet figured out how to emulate cold startup reliably, so that's the next step.
As usual, more details and links are available on the project wiki, and we're available to answer questions in #startup on irc.mozilla.org.
Recent activity:
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Bug 511761 landed, Ben Hsieh's work to optimize fastload cache invalidation, with a 3% win on warm startup of WinXP.
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Alfred Kayser put a patch up on bug 511754, which improves JAR file reading efficiency.
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Rob Strong closed bug 521956 and started some cleanup of nsUpdateService, further reducing the size of it for bug 311965.
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Drew has a patch up for bug 506814, getting rid of Change GetPersistentDescriptor/SetPersistentDescriptor on Mac.
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Bug 504858 pushes back the population of the bookmarks toolbar until after the browser window comes up. Dao put up a new patch. Measuring the wall-clock effect of this on startup, and determining what exactly is "gaming" the Ts test is part of the work here.
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Service caching work in bug 516085 still needs to be pushed to the Places branch for testing. Projects in a holding pattern:
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Moving font-loading out of the startup path on Mac: Jonathan Kew filed bug 519445 with a WIP patch for yet further reductions in Mac startup time spent in font system initialization.
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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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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.
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No updates on Zack's CSS parser changes in bug 513149.