Misc

I have been using dates to mark passage of time in the Snappy project. I think I’ll switch to a simple counter instead. We are ~36 updates into this project.

Blogging

Ludovic Hirlimann blogged about how spotlight spends a lot of time indexing the Firefox network ‘Cache’ directory (known problem, bug 718910). If you experience this problem and would like to see it fixed, please comment in the bug if the suggested remedy helps.

Tim Taubert wrote about reducing new-tab jank. I mention Tim a lot in these updates. He takes on a lot of interesting bugs in Firefox frontend. Hopefully he’ll make a habit out of blogging about his work.

Networking

Nick Hurley landed a change to reduce our maximum cache size to 350 megabytes. In order to avoid excessive disk IO traffic old cache size of 1 gigabyte remains in effect until the cache is reset. See bug 709297 and Nick’s blog post for more details. Progress is also being made on bug 777328 so we can move towards not blowing away our cache 10-20% of the time.

Michal Novotny is proceeding with incrementally reducing cache-caused jank that’s due to holding a lock on the main thread while doing IO on a background thread. He also removing a multitude of synchronous necko APIs, see bug 695399.

Patrick McManus is removing synchronous proxy-related code, see bug 766973 for the DNS-related bit. Turns out our proxy code also does all kinds of synchronous operations when detecting proxy configuration, etc. This is being worked on, but hasn’t been filed yet.

I usually try to highlight work that has already landed, but in this case it is important to point out that the Necko team is working hard on addressing significant problems in the networking code. These problems are tricky and will take a while to fix. The team is relatively new and is still discovering hidden surprises in their codebase.

Profiler

Benoit Girard posted a preview of view-source in the profiler. This will be handy for figuring out where performance problems lay, especially in JS files that have been preprocessed (our JS preprocessor does not try to keep the line numbers sane).