AWSY now available for mobile

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Posted by: stak
Tags: mozilla
Posted on: 2013-02-01 16:29:39

The MemShrink team (and John Schoenick in particular) have been maintaining Are we Slim Yet (AWSY), a memory usage tracker for Firefox. It has been quite useful in monitoring Firefox's memory usage over time and catching regressions. I recently got a similar benchmark working for Fennec. It's a little more sketchy because it runs on a device plugged in to the box under my desk that freezes every once in a while, but the data it's generating still seems to be quite reliable, and lets us find memory usage regressions in Fennec.

You can find the data at areweslimyet.com/mobile. It gets run on all working inbound builds, so the regression ranges tend to be pretty tight. For the most part regressions in the "Start" and "StartSettled" data lines are the most interesting since those indicate startup baseline memory regressions.

If you have ideas on how to improve AWSY, please file an issue (or even better, pull requests!) in the github repository at Nephyrin/MozAreWeSlimYet.

Posted by Grant at 2013-02-01 19:36:34

Hey I've been loving AWSY for a while now - its perfect!

Would it be possible to add nightly builds of Chrome and Opera to the graphs?

Are we fast yet has Chrome and Safari, it'd be interesting to see memory usage of these browsers especially after loading 100 tabs

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Posted by njn at 2013-02-01 21:25:49

No, unfortunately. AWSY relies heavily on Firefox's internal memory profiling infrastructure. Chrome and Safari don't have anything comparable.

Besides, the comparison wouldn't be that useful. Memory consumption isn't interesting in and of itself; it's only interesting for the effect it has on speed and reliability, and the effects are hard to quantify. If browser A uses 400 MiB on one workload and browser B uses 600 MiB, you can't conclude much from that.

However, we definitely want to prevent Firefox's memory consumption increasingly unnecessarily, and that's where AWSY's strength lies.

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Posted by William Lachance at 2013-02-02 09:31:57

Very cool. For the freezing issue, we (the ateam) are planning to create a solution that allows these phones to be power cycled when they die:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=828668

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Posted by stak at 2013-02-02 13:49:02

Good to know, thanks!

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