Meeting notes.

Memshink had a good idea to switch to bi-weekly meetings. We are going to try the same for Snappy. My plan is to still solicit status updates and blog weekly, but only meet in person every two weeks. The next meeting will be on May 17.

Borders/Gradients

Turns out that most of the painting overhead in accelerated versions of Firefox is spent rendering borders and gradients. I blogged a little about this earlier. It’s a combination us not caching gradients and being overly picky about rendering border corners perfectly (ie to spec). Our chrome renders particularly slowly because as our chrome CSS changed (after implementing d2d accel and optimizing for exists codepaths), we started hitting more slow paths in the border code. We need telemetry to notice when things are rendering slower than expected.

According to Bas we need to enable Azure for content and then start implementing respective caches. We should get significant speedups within 3-4 weeks, but to get close to the baseline performance of the no-borders/gradients build will take 3-4months. In the meantime we should look into simplifying our chrome to not feature as much expensive CSS.

Longer term, Frank will look into reimplementing the tab bar in pure HTML  instead of XUL to maximize responsiveness.

CC/GC Pauses

Incremental GC should turned back on soon (bugs 750424, 750416). Olli relanded bug 747675 which should reduce CC times somewhat.

Kyle’s big memory leak fix from last week turned out to occasionally cause leaks where there were none before: see bug 751466.

Frontend

Tim spent the week in a seemingly infinite r?/r- cycle attempting to prove that one handle clicks on tabs without setTimeout, bug 743877. Tim also moved thumbnail storage away from network cache. This reduced cache contention (and browser freezes), bug 744388. Paulo continued nuking sync favicon api usage, bug 728168.