Snappy: Start-up & Shutdown

Problem Statement

Users current spend more time than necessary waiting for Firefox to become useful on start-up. Firefox can also be very slow to shutdown, requiring users to kill the process.

Goal

Firefox start-up and shutdown will be fast and lightweight. This means 3-10 second start-up time and < 1 second shutdown time.

Scope

• Start-up: Time from when Firefox is launched until the browser is useful.
• Shutdown: Time from when exit is initiated (may be due to clicking X, the Quit menu item, or Restart) until the Firefox process is terminated.

Status

• Start-up: mostly done? what work remains?
• Shutdown: need to determine what currently happens on start-up and only do a small subset of that.

Projects

Start-up

• UX improvements to show the Firefox UI faster and in coherent form
• detect preexisting hung firefox and terminate when starting up

Shutdown

• remove SQL queries
• need to immediately terminate remaining query work (like awesomebar queries)
• deadlocks
• gc/cc before we release memory

Team

Size: 1-2 people ~4months Who: Perf Team

Risks