LinuxTextPerformance

Firefox performance on Linux significantly lags behind Firefox performance on Windows. Currently, measuring and drawing text stand out. The trunk backend for text wants to use Pango on Linux for complex text shaping and font selection, but not layout. Layout needs to be done inside the browser, but giving Pango a string to measure or draw requires going through its high-level calls designed for text layout. Using this method versus the old Xft backend results in a massive slowdown.

Relevant bugs: bug 334064, bug 330064, and gnome bug 348825

One solution is to avoid using pango for measurement on western text.

Profiles before and after:

• Pango alone
• Pango w/Xft

Optimizing pango helps more.

• Pango alone with larger fontset cache
• Pango w/Xft with larger fontset cache