Performance Tools Newsletter (H1 Edition)

[Gregory Mierzwinski]

Welcome to the latest edition of the Performance Tools Newsletter! The PerfTools team empowers engineers with tools to continuously improve the performance of Mozilla products. See below for highlights from the last half.

Highlights 🎉

Profiler

• [astor] 🌐 Removed some unneeded [[maybe_unused]] annotations

• [canova] Firefox Profiler UI now orders global tracks by activity

• [canova] Added proper accessibility labels to the Firefox Profiler popup dropmarker

• [mstange] Tooltip backtraces now include frame line numbers

PerfCompare

• [sumairq] 🌐 Resolved various user experience issues in PerfCompare such as spacing/sizing of components and text

• [netacci] 🌐 Made significant improvements to the PerfCompare search functionality across PerfCompare and Treeherder. Various PerfCompare user experience issues were also resolved by her this half such as showing the browser name in the results

• [julienw] PerfCompare Graphs are now grouped

• [julienw] Added sorting to the subtest page on PerfCompare

• [csevere] Results table is now editable

• [bacasandrei] Fixed an issue that caused incorrect comparisons between different applications

• [aesanu] Data can now be copied from expanded rows

• [aesanu] Added OS version to the platform name on PerfCompare

PerfTest

• Thanks to work done by Andra Esanu [andra], Beatrice Acasandrei [bacasandrei], Alex Finder [afinder], and Florin Bilt [fbilt] we now have the ability to monitor and quickly respond to critical performance test regressions! Regressions in these tests result in an immediate backout.

• Example of a Critical Performance Test Alert

• Updated Mozilla Regression Policy on Critical Tests

• [myeongjun] 🌐 Added the ability to run MozPerftest tests in Mach Try Perf by their test name (or folders/paths)

• [myeongjun] 🌐 Landed a patch to Mozperftest Mochitest for helping with naming changes

• [aglavic][sparky] Modified PerfCompare, and Mach Try Perf to use Lando commit IDs instead of HG revisions

• [kshampur] AWFY was updated to include JetStream3 and new platforms

• [kshampur] Talos now supports Python 3.12

• [kshampur] Speedometer3 can now be profiled in CI

• [kshampur] Baseline profiles have been integrated into our Android Fenix startup tests and Raptor Fenix tests to obtain more realistic measurements

• [kshampur] An upcoming patch will make it possible to provide custom settings to our gecko profile tasks in CI

• [aglavic] A new category was added to Mach Try Perf for critical android performance tests

• [aglavic] Android testing is now enabled by default in Mach Try Perf

• [bacasandrei] The Perfherder Graphs View now shows if the test should produce alerts

• [fbilt] Made it simpler to distinguish between original tasks and the retriggers in the Perfherder Graphs View

• [sparky] Performance testing using Mochitest Plain on Android is now available in MozPerftest

• [sparky] Profiling now available for the MozPerftest Mochitest layer on Mac, Windows, and Linux

• [sparky] Alert comment has been updated to include more information for devs, and to surface the backout policy better

Other

• [julienw] about:logging for Android landed

• [sparky] Added support in Treeherder for Lando Commit IDs and local Treeherder link output

• [sparky] Telemetry Probe Alerting and Monitoring prototyping has started, follow this bug for progress on the project

Blog Posts ✍️

• [netacci] 🌐 My Work on PerfCompare: Firefox's Performance Comparison Tool

• [netacci] 🌐 Optimizing Full-Text Search in Django: My Outreachy Internship Journey at Firefox

Events 📅

• Andrej Glavic [aglavic] helped organize a SPDY Community Meetup at the Toronto Office! A recording of the event can be found here.

Contributors 🌐

• Gabriel Astorgano [:astor]

• 🎉 Gabriel is a new contributor to Mozilla!

• Chineta Adinnu [:netacci]

• 🎉 Netacci recently completed her Outreachy program with us! See her blog posts above to see how it went for her, and read about the challenges she had to overcome.

• Sumair Qaisar [:sumairq]

• Mayank Bansal [:mayankleoboy1]

• Myeongjun Go [:myeongjun]

• 🎉 Jun has recently surpassed 5 years of contributing with us! We are extremely grateful for all the amazing contributions he’s made over the years.

If you have any questions, or are looking to add performance testing for your code component, you can find us on Element in #perftest, #profiler, #perfcompare. On Slack, you can find us in #perf-help.

P.S. We’ve changed the icon for contributors to a globe (🌐) as a reference to the global nature of contributions to the Performance Tools projects. This makes it possible to more clearly show when a highlight is from a contributor. If you have suggestions for alternative emojis, please feel free to share them!