Another week in Firefox startup.
Good news is, joelr joined the platform team and is kicking startup in the shins. He’s on the ball, I hope he doesn’t mind my saying.
My OS X-specific XPT-linking patch from last time landed. Nightly trunk (Minefield) users on OS X, I’d like to hear from you if you notice an improvement in cold startup time. I was unable to, however, despite noting a good decrease in I/O. Ted is working on improving OS X packaging overall in bug 463605.
Making progress on setting up a Talos cold Ts. A byproduct is that we’re going to allow Talos tests to run head and tail scripts, which may be useful for others. Simulating a cold startup on Windows looks like it might be a little tricky, but other than that I don’t foresee any roadblocks. (What could go wrong?)
Posted a list of all files touched on OS X cold startup, including time spent in the associated syscalls, number of bytes touched, and throughput. You can drill down into each file to see all the I/O-related syscalls on it. This is data from one run only, so it’s not smoothed out across multiple runs. I have noticed some jitter between runs: For example, reading four bytes of search.json will take 200ms (!) during one run, but on most others it’s something like 10-20ms (!). The order of files by duration tends to remain fairly consistent, though. I’ll try to keep this up-to-date; already it’s several days old, and since then I’ve improved the output so that it shows the counts of each syscall on the main page. Feel free to rummage through my startup dump.
My daily startup notes, data, and scripts are open as always. For details and context, check there.