Firefox/Projects/StartupPerformance/MeasuringStartup

We've been using a method Vlad blogged about here. 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:

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

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.