Taras’ Blog

Recently there have been a number of blog posts on optimizations possible via Local StorageAPI. When Microsoft, Google, Amazon and a number of others aggressively adopt a new feature, people notice. The optimization is to use Local Storage to reduce network requests and/or payload size. This should result in a more responsive experience for the [...]

Canadians and their Profilers Much like eating bacon, writing profiling tools is a favourite Canadian pastime. Unfortunately, while today’s meeting had more Canadians than last time, a few the usual suspects are still busy with Android bugs this week and weren’t able to attend.  There are no updates on about:jank or our profiler this week. [...]

The meeting was short this time because all of the participating people in the Toronto office conspired be busy or on vacation today. Our UX team helped us decide to turn on tabs-on-demand + do tab restore by default, Bug 711193. This change will make interacting with the browser more responsive after startup, help MemShink and [...]

We cancelled last week’s snappy meeting due to Perf/Snappy workweek + FOSDEM. See Jared’s post for a summary of the workweek, I’ll mention the rest below. We figured out a strategy for avoiding blocking DOM Storage IO (use scriptblocker to async preload relevant dom storage. Do async writeback to commit). We have a plan for [...]

Slow Sessions – Tabs-on-Demand Armed to the teeth with about:jank, I was testing session restore scenarios that people reported. While at it I came up with a testcase for bug 711193. At first we were going to use telemetry to debate the merits of tabs on demand by default, but I feel my example illustrates [...]

Meeting notes. Network Cache Horrors Last week we discovered that our cache uses main thread locks to successfully block on off-main thread io. See (Bug 695399, Bug 717761). QA did an experiment which confirmed that our disk cache is performing poorly. Flash Lag We are looking into reports of flash lag, tracking Bug 720000. Initial QA data shows [...]

The most user facing fix has been discovery and removal of some sneaky cache IO on the main thread. Saptashi did some analysis on the impact of running sqlite in async mode on mobile. Turns out it’s only a win for DELETEs. Expect a blog post from him soon. Dave discovered that we sometimes wait [...]

I have been working under assumption that the browser gets less snappy as more tabs are opened. This increases the chances of having an ill-behaved website in the background. An ill-behaved tab (or a couple of them) can in theory ruin scrolling, typing, clicking, etc in active tabs. However I do not have anything behind [...]

I expected to a slow week, but there was a surprising amount of progress. I  take this as further evidence that having managers  go on vacation does wonders to engineer productivity Interactivity with lots of tabs We spent a lot of time pondering how to approach browser sluggishness in light of having tons of tabs [...]

Work is continuing from last week: jank profiler, DOM storage fixes, font enumeration and SQL telemetry analysis. This was the last Snappy meeting of the year. We plan to hold a perf + snappy hack week at hackerspace.be Jan 31 – Feb 3, followed by attending FOSDEM. I’m off until January 3rd,  see #perf for [...]