Snappy, March 22nd

Taras is off for a couple of weeks as he is a proud new daddy. (Congrats Taras!) In his absence, I’m bringing you this week’s Snappy update.

Last week Taras started his post with a summary of the work that went into Firefox 13. I’m pleased that Vlad has resolved the first Snappy bug for Firefox 14. (It’s a Telemetry probe but definitely a righteous change as it’s measuring slow SQL.)

Here’s a rundown of what happened in Snappy this week.

Slow SQL

As I said above, Vlad landed a Telemetry probe for slow dynamic SQL queries. He also updated about:telemetry to show the data.

Profiler

The profiler saw progress this week. I hope this will continue as Benoit has a bit of time to devote to Snappy again.

Ehsan landed Android stackwalking support.
Markus Stange (mstange) has been rocking the entire UI. See the new front end screenshot. (bug 719530)
Front-end now using chrome and web worker. Improved the performance of operations in the UI to support a larger profile.
Investigated adding an option to IonMonkey to generate JIT with frame pointers on profiling builds, which will let us use our current infrastructure. (bug 736299)
Working towards multiple thread profiling and investigating OpenGL profiling with fence.
Vlad and Benoit are working to modify the SPS profiler extension to work with the Snappy Symbolication Server. (See Chromehang below.)

Chromehang

Updates courtesy of Vlad.

Marching towards a public release, the Snappy Symbolication Server was submitted for privacy review and security code review.
Vlad blogged about chromehang work. Read it.
The about:telemetry add-on was updated to show chromehang reports locally. This version of add-on will not be released until the Symbolication Server is deployed publicly. (See bullet 1 above.) Until then, the add-on can be download manually.

Smooth Scrolling

Avi has been working on fixing scrolling for OSX and Linux.
Avi tweaked scrolling animation to be 400ms instead of 800ms. (bug 736251 and bug 737758)

Peptest

Mark added date controls and a selector for period of moving average.
Mark is working on figuring out how to detect and report changes.
Peptest is enabled on try. Submit your test cases (mcote can review) for changes for which you want to measure the effect on responsiveness.

Cycle Collector

Looking at speeding up CCs with two tabs open (Gmail+mozilla Wiki) by removing more stuff from the CC graph. Landed bugs 735342, 736763, 735550, 737060.
mccr8 has a preliminary patch for delaying slow CCs. (bug 710496)
More preliminary patches from mccr8 for removing more things from the CC graph (bug 736563, bug 737075)
Next will investigate CCs with 6 or so tabs open and reported slowdowns from add-ons.

Shutdown

Rafael identified new issues related to shutdown and has some further paths to check.

The switch to private browsing doesn’t close the db. (bug 735697)
Checking that Connection::internalClose is called on every connection we called Connection::initialize on. (bug 711076)
Have the basics for write poisoning working. (bug 732173)
Patch under review to decide if we should take the fast exit path or not. (bug 731741)