Performance

Performance

Mozilla's desktop performance team focuses on improvements to the Gecko platform and desktop Firefox. You can find us on the #perf channel of irc.mozilla.org or email perf@mozilla.com

The team:

• Vladan Djeric, :vladan on IRC, blog
• Aaron Klotz :aklotz, blog
• Roberto Vitillo :rvitillo, blog
• Avi Halachmi :avih, blog
• David Teller :Yoric, blog
• David Major :dmajor

Current Projects

• Weekly status reports: Mozilla Status Board

• In Q2, half the team will be working on improving web content performance.
• Our Q1 2015 goals
• Q4 2014 goals
• Q3 2014 goals
• Q2 2014 goals
• Q1 2014 goals

Measuring & improving Firefox performance

Write-ups

• Firefox performance knowledge-base
• How to evaluate the performance of your new feature
• Information on Talos automatic performance tests:
  • What to do when your check-in causes a Talos regression
  • Additional reading: How the Automation Team does performance sheriffing
• Avoid SQLite in your next Firefox feature

Tools

• Telemetry:
  • Telemetry dashboard
  • Adding a new Telemetry probe
  • The "More Dashboards" sidebar in the main dash has links to all our dashes
  • Cerberus: Automated regression detection for Telemetry
    • Set the "alert_mails" field in your histogram declaration to get automatic email notifications of regressions
  • You can do custom Telemetry analyses using MapReduce or Spark
• SPS Gecko Profiler
  • Reporting a Performance problem
• Buildbot/Talos
  • graphs.mozilla.org: for visualizing past Talos test results
  • Joel Maher maintains a dashboard of current Talos regressions & improvements
• MozGTestBench
  • Write low level microbenchmarks using GTest
• xperf
  • Tracing VirtualAlloc With Xperf
• Statuser: Restartless Firefox extension for as-it-happens hang monitoring.

Archive (Delete soon)

Old progress reports:

• June 2014 Meeting Minutes, Report
• February 2014 Meeting Minutes, Report
• December 2013 Meeting Minutes, Report
• November 2013 Meeting Minutes, Report
• September 2013 Meeting Minutes, Report
• August 2013 Meeting Minutes, Report
• July 2013 Meeting Minutes
• June 2013 Meeting Minutes
• May 2013 Meeting Minutes

Old Projects

• Mobile Startup Shrink
• Startup Performance
• Front-end Performance (i.e., responsiveness)
• Add-on Performance
• Snappy
• Mobile Performance Info

Tools:

• Codesighs - a tool which analyzes code and data size.
• Performance:Tools. For measuring performance. Tip o' the propeller-cap to Daniel Roberts (zuperdee@penguinpowered.com) for the pointers.
• Performance:Probes. Project to integrate a system of performance probes into Gecko.

Old Documentation and Presentations:

• Code Footprint Performance:Footprint_Reduction_Techniques explains common bad patterns and how to correct them.
• Performance:Profiling_JuJu. Things you should know about doing profiling. Tips and tricks for some of the tools, and lots of other Good Things To Know.
• Profiling and leak analysis on the Mac.
• Performance:Footprint_Tools. Presentation on footprint tools
• Performance:Startup slides Presentation on general performance tools
• Performance:Leak_Tools. Presentation on memory leaks detection tools
• Mac Performance Tools Presentation on performance tools that work on Mac