Firefox Startup Performance Weekly Summary
Current numbers are available on the Performance Snapshot page.
Summary, relative to Firefox 3.5:
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Warm startup: For Mac, 36% better on 3.6 and 35% better on 3.7. For Windows, 5% and 5%. Flat on Linux. Also, Warm startup for Mac on 3.6 is a whopping 13% better than last week, due to the landing of bug 517804.
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Cold startup: For Mac, 20% better on both 3.6 and 3.7. For Windows, not measuring yet. For Linux, we're seeing a regression of ~9% across branch and trunk in the snapshot but not on the graphs, so I need to figure out where the discrepancy is. This week's activity:
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Dirty-cold-Ts went live this week, thanks to Alice and Lukas. Example: cold startup with a large places.sqlite on Mac.
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Joel is making progress on making a super-static Firefox in bug 525013.
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Ben is making progress on the fastload replacement in bug 520309.
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No updates on Windows cold-startup testing for Talos on bug 522807. I need to test on Vista, and turn off Pre/Superfetch.
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Taras has patches up for service caching (bug 516085) and super-fast-path-ing of Components.* (bug 512584), however the latter he's hit a wall, passing on to Blake or someone else who knows that code.
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Ted landed rebasing on Windows in bug 484799.
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Jonathan Kew has a new patch in bug 519445 for further reductions in Mac startup time spent in font system initialization, just about there...
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Ryan Flint put a patch to minify JS on bug 524858, not working yet, but significantly reduced the size of shipped JavaScript files. Projects in a holding pattern:
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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. 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.