Gerrit Performance Update

[Aaron Gable]

This is the first of what will be a series of regular updates regarding Gerrit performance.

tl;dr: We know Gerrit performance is significantly affecting your productivity and happiness, Gerrit team is prioritizing speed improvements right now, and look out in two weeks for another update.

First, thank you to all of you who participated in Chromegeist and left feedback on Gerrit. Of the nearly 300 of you who rated your experience using Gerrit, over a third said you were "quite a bit" annoyed with it -- or worse. Of all the tools and services we offer, it was deemed to be the most annoying. Nearly half of the free-form comments specifically mentioned Gerrit's performance and reliability problems. We hear you loud and clear.

And not just us: the entire Gerrit team hears you as well. In light of this feedback, the Gerrit team is reshuffling headcount to make sure that they can focus on performance in the immediate future, including pushing back other planned feature work. The first big project they're working on right now is adding metrics collection to the frontend, so they can better measure the user-visible latency instead of just the server-side latency metrics they have today.

In addition, some nice improvements have been landed just in the last week. Wyatt and Kasper landed a series of changes which address 10+ second delays when loading changes with many comment threads, and that change rolled out on April 10th. Wyatt also landed a change to circumvent a slow load of unnecessary content, and Patrick is working on a change to parallelize some of the heavy logic when loading search result pages, including your homepage dashboard.

These changes are just a start. They address some of the low-hanging fruit, but it's important to note that none of these are expected to result in sweeping improvements. The team is still brainstorming ideas for that, and is counting on the upcoming client-side metrics to give insight.

In the meantime, please continue sending feedback. Gerrit recently launched a new HATS (HAppiness Tracking Survey), specifically asking questions about Gerrit's speed. If you get one of these surveys popping up in the lower right corner of your screen, please take a moment to fill it out. This survey will be ongoing, so the team can track user satisfaction as fixes are rolled out. And as always, please use the "Send Feedback" link in the lower right corner to file a bug any time you experience something particularly egregious. We need this data to prioritize pain points and fixes.

In the future, you can expect these updates to be coming every two weeks, and we plan to provide you with nice graphs showing the improvements as they come.

Thanks for reading!

Aaron, on behalf of Chrome Operations and Gerrit Team

[Erik Chen]

Super happy to see this update - thanks for keeping Chromium devs in the loop. :)

--
--
Chromium Developers mailing list: chromi...@chromium.org
View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe:
http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-dev
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Chromium-dev" group.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-dev/CAH58R2ey2YvyQmdwDopKeNstOfS2HUCVWjRqbLjeUq7tx0HOhg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Peter Kasting]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 11:04 AM, Erik Chen <erik...@chromium.org> wrote:

Super happy to see this update - thanks for keeping Chromium devs in the loop. :)

I echo this.  Gerrit often frustrates me, but Aaron demonstrates a consistent pattern of great communication over time.  I always feel like the team cares what I think, wants to work on what's important to me, and tries to send me updates as things happen.  As an outsider, that's all I can really ask for.

Thanks!

PK

[Nico Weber]

Thanks for the update, especially looking forward to the client-side metrics. Is there a bug to follow for progress on that?

On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 2:01 PM, Aaron Gable <aga...@chromium.org> wrote:

[Aaron Gable]

Some of this is tracked in (internal only, sorry) b/78450640, and some in b/68928769.

[Sadrul Chowdhury]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 12:27 PM Aaron Gable <aga...@chromium.org> wrote:

Some of this is tracked in (internal only, sorry) b/78450640, and some in b/68928769.

By 'client-side' metrics, do you mean this is something I would be able to see/explore on https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/ pages? e.g. when a navigation takes a long time, I could do <insert-steps> to get the metrics, and file a bug with that? (I looked at the linked bugs above, and do not understand if this is something I would be able to do or not)

Thank you!

Sadrul

 

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to chromium-dev...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-dev/CAH58R2eyWsgpAw6PE2huNYkABUotpGnMA6UQwsUXWZaYYEZy4w%40mail.gmail.com.

[Aaron Gable]

That's not exactly what they're looking at right now, but it could be a possibility. What they're looking into right now is automatic metrics collection: every pageload, report to the server a blob of data regarding how long the API requests took from the frontend's perspective, how long it took to parse the results of those requests, how long it took to render the page using the results of those requests, etc.