Taras’ Blog

Moving files into jars reduces amount of seeks on startup, and has miscellaneous other performance/organization benefits. I added resource://gre-resources/ which maps to jar:toolkit.jar!/res/. To move a file into a jar: Add a jar.mn entry. Remove existing references to the file in Makefile.in, packages-static files Add file to the removed-files.in list of dead files Update urls [...]

Maintaining a module, killing off another one I was granted ownership of the jar module. Today, I resumed my quest to kill off the barely limping stopwatch module. Together with nuking STANDALONE mode in jar stuff, I will have landed 75KB worth of -ve diffs this month. It feels so good to delete code. IO [...]

When I originally started at Mozilla, I only knew the people who interviewed me. But I quickly discovered beltzner when he uttered a sacrilegious statement that went something like: “….. nothing could be as boring as filesystems….”. Mike Beltzner is one of my favourite characters at Mozilla for his ability to speak his mind, but [...]

Turns out that if someone compromises a merchant that you shop with, such as bikenashbar.com, then they are entitled to your money as long as they can show to the bank that they have your billing/shipping information. According to Chase it’s not fraud if they steal your address along with the card number.  I recommend [...]

When it comes to taking on crazy tasks involving disguising code, you can always count on Joshua. This time Joshua has gone deep in Pork territory to do a very impressive rewrite (one that would not be even close to possible with anything other than Elsa-based tools) and he is blogging about it. He posted [...]

With much pain I managed to convince a Vmware WinXP virtual machine to run in VirtualBox. At first it ran very sluggishly(>3 hours to do a build?), but after I turned off IO Apic stuff in Windows, it’s become disturbingly fast. It now takes 40minutes to build a wince fennec vs almost 80minutes it took [...]

Python GDB Rocks! I wanted a non-painful way to figure out what’s causing bonus file IO. I’ve noticed that gtk likes to open files, but I didn’t have the exact details. So I grabbed python gdb, and with some tips on syscalls from gdb old-timers managed to produce a report to assign blame for open()ing [...]

Every once in a while people want to be analyze C code. If you are one of those people, checkout bug 494960. For GCC 4.3, you’ll need to update your patch queue. If you you followed the Dehydra install instructions do something like: cd gcc-4.3.0/.hg/patches hg pull -u cd ../.. hg qpush -a and rebuild [...]

I finally landed the remaining GCC patches needed to get a useful Dehydra without any of that gcc-patching pain! This week I also got some nice contributions from a contributor with a masterplan. Overall I expect cool things to happen once GCC 4.5 ships with plugin support. It’ll open up a jar of whoopass like [...]

I wrote Fennecmark to automate some of the tasks that I did manually while doing performance debugging. I tried to capture some of the “perceived performance” in numbers. My goal is to focus on user-visible areas of performance. Ideally it will enable us to track performance better to ensure that key features do not regress [...]