AWSY/Tests

All of the values we report to Perfherder for memory come from about:memory. It might be helpful to run that locally to get an idea of what we measure.

Test Descriptions

Explicit Memory summary

• This is memory explicitly reported by a memory reporter. It includes all the memory allocated via explicit calls to heap allocation functions (such as malloc and new) and to non-heap allocations functions (such as mmap and VirtualAlloc).

Possible regression causes

• A regression in this usually means a new feature is using or retaining more memory and should be looked at. These are easier to diagnose as we can compare memory reports.

See the about:memory mdn page for more details.

Heap Unclassified summary

• The "heap-unclassified" value represents heap-allocated memory that is not measured by any memory reporter. This is typically 10--20% of "explicit".

Possible regression causes

• A regression in this can indicate that we're leaking memory or that additional memory reporters should be added.
• An improvement can indicate that leaks have been fixed or that we added new memory reporters.

See the about:memory mdn page for more details.

Images summary

• This is a subset of the "explicit" measurement that focuses on memory used to render images.

Possible regression causes

• A regressions in this can indicate leaks or poor memory usage in the image subsystem. In the past this was persistent problem.

JS summary

• This is the "js-main-runtime/" value in about:memory which is all the memory attributed to the javascript engine.

Possible regression causes

• A regression in this number can indicate leaks in the JS engine, optimizations that take performance into consideration at the expense of more memory, or problems with the garbage collector.

Resident Memory summary

• This is a higher level measurement provided by the operating system. We sum the "resident" memory (RSS) with the resident-unique memory of the content processes. It's pretty noisy and large so it's not very useful in detecting smaller regressions.

Possible regression causes

• Regressions in this often track regressions in explicit and heap unclassified. If we see a regression in resident, but not in other reports this can indicate we are leaking untracked memory (perhaps through shared memory, graphics allocations, file handles, etc).