Firefox/Projects/StartupPerformance/MeasuringStartup

The following method is based on a blog post byVlad. The steps are below.

1. save this html file somewhere locally
2. create a new profile, run Firefox with it at least once, so all files are created, etc
3. execute this command, with your profile name substituted, and invoking firefox in a way appropriate for your platform:

<code>./firefox -P YourProfileName -no-remote file:///..../startup.html#`python -c 'import time; print int(time.time() * 1000);'` </code><code></code>

Setup on Windows

To run these tests on Windows, you can follow these steps (after step 1 and 2 above):

1. Download and install Python.
   
2. Download and install Cygwin. The default settings should be sufficient.
   
3. Add python.exe or its containing folder to the PATH (or use the full path to the executable in the command below).
   
4. In the Cygwin console, run the following command:
   

/cygdrive/c/.../firefox.exe -P YourProfileName -no-remote file:///C:/.../startup.html#`python.exe -c 'import t
ime; import sys; sys.stdout.write(str(int(time.time() * 1000)));'`

Startup times using this method will be a little bloated due to the overhead introduced by the Cygwin console, but should still be reliable if compared with each other.

Cold startup on Mac

The following is specific to Mac OSX and is required to evict Firefox code pages from memory and clear the Unified Buffer Cache (UBC). purge does NOT do this.

#!/bin/sh

FF=/Volumes/Fujitsu80Gb

diskutil unmount force $FF
diskutil mount /dev/disk1s2

$FF/Minefield$*.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -no-remote -foreground -P clean file://$FF/startup.html#`python -c 'import time; print int(time.time() * 1000);'`

This assumes that your removable media is at /dev/disk1s2.