Firefox Performance Update
I've been focusing more on Jetpack development this quarter, but will still be posting performance round-ups regularly here. In fact, here's one now:
- Taras Glek continues to blog his progress on improving the binaries we ship, talking about how reordering binaries improves memory use as well as load time, leveraging GCC's PGO for fast startup, and finally about Icegrind, his Valgrind plugin that generates a log of the order of access to mmap'd files.
- Are we fast yet?! The answer to that question, at least in regards to JavaScript performance test suites, can be found at AreWeFastYet.com, where you'll see graphs that show Firefox trunk's performance relative to Google's V8 and Apple's Nitro on the Sunspider and V8Bench tests. I won't spoil the answer for you, you'll have to go check it out for yourself.
- I finished and checked-in my changes to the Tinderbox Pushlog, adding a new feature that provides at-a-glance comparison in performance test results between any two pushes on the page (screenshot). It will go live next time Marcus pushes changes out to his server. But he's not online at the moment, so I don't know when this feature will go live. Heh, it went live moments after I published this post.
- Heather Arthur and Clint Talbert are working on a project to add performance data to Addons.mozilla.org for extensions. They're starting with the effect of a given extension on Firefox startup time. Follow along on the bug, or watch project Dirty Harry on Github.
- Improving the AMO extension validator: AMO scans uploaded extensions and reports problems to the authors. For performance best-practices, we should at least warn the authors if possible if their add-on is doing something that'll make Firefox slow. This bug is for warning about add-ons that don't have their content in a JAR file. If you see any thing in the best practices guide that can be statically detected, please file a bug for it here. If you have any other performance-related bugs, blog posts, anecdotes or other tomfoolery, post it in the comments!