Landed This Week

Neil Deakin joined the Snappy effort. He is working on eliminating pointless reflows in the tab strip. His fix for bug 752486 landed, 752376, 752496 are next.

Brian Bondy landed removal of our prefetch-nuking code in bug 770911. xul.dll preload is now always on based on our telemetry startup study in bug 765850.

Bill McCloskey landed the following improvements to reduce garbage collection pauses:

• bug 777919 - Free LifoAlloc chunks on background thread, instead of as part of the final IGC slice. This isn’t a problem for most people, but for some people on OSX it can take anywhere from 50ms to 250ms or more.
• bug 778993 - Separate runtime’s gcMallocBytes from compartment’s gcMallocBytes, so we trigger less non-incremental GCs with many tabs open
• bug 767209 - Make GC slices longer when not painting to avoid non-incremental GCs. See Bill’s comments in bug 767209 for some insight into the complex heuristics that go into minimizing GC interruptions: comment 1, comment 2.

Coming Soon

In the coming week I expect to see some good optimizations land for page rendering, tab-switching behavior, more robust cache, etc.

Some Snappy people will be attending MozCamp.eu 2012 in Warsaw, Poland on September 8, 9. Expect to see lots of talk on profiling and other performance tools.

I hope to have above 15-20 Performance/Snappy people in Warsaw for the following week. This is not yet finalized. At the moment we are looking to see if there is a coworking space or a company in Warsaw who could host us.