Electrolysis/Firefox/20101110

Brainstorm - Tools for Measuring Responsiveness

Alex's List

I met with Alex Limi to brainstorm a list of all user actions he wishes he could measure - ignoring priority.

Meeting Discussion

• We met to discuss the development of a tool to better measure application responsiveness.
• We don't currently have something.
• We will need something for Electrolysis that helps us determine how we are doing against our targets and helps pin point areas in which we will regress or have problems.
• We would need to define our baseline machine - what's the minimum machine would should be using.
• Some questions came up around garbage collection.
  • We could run tests without garbage collection.
  • We could keep garbage collection but be notified when it starts and stops.
• In discussion with the Tools team it looks like there are some basics in place already that we can build on.
  • We already measure the time it takes to do things - do that in Talos now.
  • What is perhaps more difficult is what happens to these actions over time, after some period of usage.
  • We agreed that some visual on top of the data would be easier for developers and others to interpret.
  • The take-away is that we can probably develop something iteratively, starting with a short list of actions we want to track.

Next Actions

• Sheila and Chris will pick out a list of 6 or so key actions that we would like to measure.
• Bob's team will group Alex's wish list into things that are easy/hard to measure.