Notes on performance and memory usage
Over the past year, the Fission MemShrink project has been working tirelessly to reduce the memory overhead of Firefox. The goal is to allow us to start spinning up more processes while still maintaining a reasonable memory footprint. I m happy to announce that we ve seen the fruits of this labor: as of version 66 we re Continue reading Doubling the Number of Content Processes in Firefox
This is a continuation of my Are They Slim Yet series. For background see my previous installment. Firefox s upcoming release 57 has a huge focus on performance. We ve quantum-ed all the things but we haven t really talked about memory usage, which is something that often falls by the wayside in the pursuit of performance. Luckily Continue reading Firefox Memory Usage in the Quantum Era
MemShrink, it s still a thing Although not as active, we still have a MemShrink group at Mozilla. We ve transitioned from an all out assault on memory usage to mostly just attempting to keep memory usage sane. I wasn t around when things started, but when I joined there were at least seven people actively attending our Continue reading MemShrink s 6th Birthday
Aside from some pangs of nostalgia, it is with great pleasure that I announce the retirement of areweslimyet.com, the areweslimyet github project, and its associated infrastructure (a sad computer in Mountain View under dvander s desk and a possibly less sad computer running the website that s owned by the former maintainer). Wait, what? Don t worry! Are Continue reading Are we slim yet is dead,…
Goal: Replace Gecko s XML parser, libexpat, with a Rust-based XML parser Firefox currently uses an old, trimmed down, and slightly modified version of libexpat, a library written in C, to support parsing of XML documents. These files include plain old XML on the web, XSLT documents, SVG images, XHTML documents, RDF, and our own XUL Continue reading A Rust-based XML parser for Firefox
This is a continuation of my Are They Slim Yet series, for background see my previous installment. With Firefox s next release, 54, we plan to enable multiple content processes internally referred to as the e10s-multi project by default. That means if you have e10s enabled we ll use up to four processes to manage Continue reading Firefox memory usage with multiple content processes
A year later let s see how Firefox fares on Windows, Linux, and OSX with multiple content processes enabled. Results We can see that Firefox with four content processes fares better than Chrome on all platforms which is reassuring; Chrome is still about 2X worse on Windows and Linux. Our current plan is to only move Continue reading Are they slim yet, round 2
Step one: Travel to England 36 hours from waking to sleeping to get to London. Land at LHR, meet up with most of your crew, take a harrowing drive on the wrong side of the road with a semi-pro rally driver to a town on the outskirts of The City. Start with a full english Continue reading Shit Viz: A trip to Chamonix
Windows build sadness aside, as I went back to my old standby, Linux, I started to wonder about its build times. Am I doing my absolute best here? Lets do some tests. I ve been using Clang ever since I need to do asan builds yeah, yeah I know GCC supports this as of version Continue reading Clang Leads Firefox Compile Times on Linux
The Tragedy Recently I was looking into doing more dev on a Windows machine you know, because basically all our users on are on Windows and ran into the sad, sad fact that a clean build is going to take me 40 minutes on a brand new pro-level laptop. That s just unacceptable. I Continue reading Firefox Compile Times on Windows are Horrible