Speed++

February 29th, 2008

So, after much wrangling, we have turned on profile-guided optimization on our Windows nightly build machine. The immediate impact is that we got faster, by about 10% on some of our benchmarks. We also exposed at least one tricky layout bug that relied on undefined order of evaluation, but dbaron fixed it. Big thanks to Rob Sayre and everyone else that made this possible!

Next up is probably going to be turning this on on our Linux nightly build machine. I think we’ve resolved the issues there, but we’re going to wait until after beta 4 for that. Apparently we shipped Firefox 1.0 nightlies with PGO, so it should be ok, although that was back with gcc 3.3 or so.

We’d like to do this on Mac, but that still needs some work. I’m hopeful that we’ll get there before Firefox 3 ships.

Posted by Ted Mielczarek Filed in firefox
2 Comments »

2 Responses to “Speed++”

  1. Firefox 3 ultimate feature: performance : Mozilla Links Says:
    February 29th, 2008 at 10:49 am

    […] Ted Mielczarec, who led the effort to PGO-enable the Mozilla build process, says a 10% performance gain can already be seen in some of Mozilla’s performance metrics. Linux builds may get PGO after Beta 4 and hopefully Mac OS X builds wil also benefit from it before the final release. […]

  2. Firefox 3 ultimate feature: Performance - DN For United Mankind Forum Says:
    March 20th, 2008 at 6:42 am

    […] is compiled again but this time guided by the produced profile generating a new optimized build. Ted Mielczarek, who led the effort to PGO-enable the Mozilla build process, says a 10% performance gain can […]