Performance/Status Meetings/2007-July-25

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Participants

smaller group, because of OSCON

Infrastructure

• Generate reliable, relevant performance data (already underway as talos). Talos status update? http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/MozillaTest/
  • running against hourly builds on trunk, see MozillaTest
  • lots of crashes with historical runs, wondering if its doable.
  • released branch points already available on 1.8 branch.
  • AI:robcee/alice to start using smaller Tp set
    • http://graphs.mozilla.org/graph.html#spst=range&spss=1144483776&spse=1178280000&spstart=1144411200&spend=1178280000&bpst=Cursor&bpstart=1144483776&bpend=1178280000&m1tid=7313&m1bl=0&m1avg=0
    • smaller sets going well, april06 - may07 done so far.
    • AI:alice/robcee why april06 start date?

• Discuss talos cpu usage metric
  • cpu usage numbers... discussion on how cpu usage being calculated.
  • going to ignore those numbers for now, no humans looking at them.
  • AI:zach will merge changes
    • Mac talos patch has been landed. qm-pmac04 setup as a buildbot slave as per the mac test ref platform, but not yet hooked up to the master.
  • use --enable-tests or else copy files in after the build completes
    • decided to copy files after build, AI:alice to write script for this.
  • AI:joduinn meet with robcee, rhelmer, zach, alice to figure out buildbot slave-in-talos issues.
• zach: Page-load-server fixes in place, running on new page load server, in parallel for a while.

• Areas where help is needed
• expand the scope of performance testing beyond Ts/Tp/TXUL/TDHMTL

• reduce noise in tests
  • reduce to ~1% (suggested by bz, not started)
  • move perf tests to chrome, so we get more reliable results, and can test more than just content
  • AI:vlad & dbaron to checkin hopefully today. Confirmed done after the meeting.
  • some hardware for large-sample-set-Tp-100times-per-page
  • havent had time for buildbot integration, not needed.
• improve performance reporting and analyses:
  • Better reports for sheriffs to easily spot perf regressions
  • Tracking down specific performance issues
• stats change to track AUS usage by osversion. bug 382044. AI:justin

• Priorities for infra:
  • Generate historical baselines
  • General profile data regularly on builds
  • Getting the perf numbers more stable
  • Developing the graph server to display time spent in each module

• AI:rob arnoldproxy-server work hopefully available today

• New ideas
  • Question: How are we tracking perf bugs, specifically, and are we doing this the same way we are triaging security bugs? Can we do it the same way if not? (AI:damon)

Gecko: Perf discussion

• Perfathon update
  • vlad has data

• pageload test rewrite (bug 387110)
  • since we have a chance at a clean break, we should look at how the composite scores are calculated
  • do we still want to ignore the biggest value when computing the mean and stddev? (there is caching and stuff that happens during the first time a page is loaded that ends up beneficially effecting subsequent page loads)
  • do we want to more cycle more intelligently?
    • e.g. do we want to keep cycling (up to some max) until the stddev drops below some number?
    • do we want to try to intelligently throw outliers out?

• update on timer resolution on windows from Rob Arnold.
  • Done, checked in earlier this week.

• Talos results
  • What's it look like for 1.8 -> 1.9?

• Todo: verification of test results
  • Fonts, valid rendering, etc.
  • TODO: Stuart: verify that concerns about talos results are addressed

• probe update
  • stan taking over mozilla/gecko side of probe work
    • will get Sun's dtrace patch as well as xp-probes checked in to new toplevel dir, then work on merging the two
    • 25jul: now compiles, but doesnt link because some objects not implemented in Leopard.
  • crowder taking spidermonkey side
    • will be dtrace only
  • module owners should let stan know if they have any situations that they'd like to analyze, so that he has more information about how to structure the probe work.
    • 25jul: no feedback from module owners yet
    • for example, examining loading from network performance vs. loading from disk
  • Sun guys will be here on Aug 30 to do a presentation on dtrace, followed by hands-on work with a smaller group of engineers

Previous weeks

• jrpof tinderbox

• synthetic tests (TODO)
  • put specific tests into talos framework
  • poach mochitest performance tests
  • individual reftest-like items

• need to get a bunch of people looking at profiles (TODO)
  • take up some of these meetings to sit down and look at profiles
  • timer-based profiling is better (vtune/jprof/oprofile/etc., not quantify)
  • TODO: vlad to generate profile for next week's meeting

• running without Fx chrome
  • new pageloader stuff can do this

• examining default theme for performance issues

• Tp vs. Tp2
  • new pageloader stuff avoids this problem
  • Tp2 was flawed in some ways -- one big one is that it loaded pages in an iframe, so initial paint delay was never coming into play, and we were potentially reflowing more thannecessary

Other Information

Related Bugs