Performance:Probes

Probing is the general concept of instrumenting code in a selective way to collect particular kinds of data. Probes can consist of special code compiled into a program, and/or a monitoring mechanism inserted by an external program.

We propose to build a system of probes to monitor Gecko performance, with a focus on breaking down time and space consumption by subsystem. The goal is to get results that are finer-grained than Tp/Tp2 etc, which measure the browser as a whole, but coarser-grained than profiling, which works at a per-function level and does not aggregate multiple functions that are parts of the same subsystem.