Project Candle: an initiative to reduce power consumption

[Nicholas Nethercote]

Greetings,

The 2015 Platform Engineering roadmap [1]
(https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Roadmap) mentioned "Candle", an initiative
that aims to reduce the power consumption of Firefox (desktop and Android) and
Firefox OS, that sits alongside other well-known initiatives like CrashKill,
CritSmash, and MemShrink. This is finally getting off the ground in a
significant way.

Details are on the wiki page [2]. Some highlights are as follows.

- There is a new mailing list, dev-power [3]. We will initially try using the
mailing list for all discussion and bug triage in preference to face-to-face
meetings. This avoids disadvantaging anyone due to their timezone and also
makes it easy to follow along in a low-commitment fashion.

- There is a new IRC channel, #power.

- There are several new MDN documentation pages relating to power profiling
[4].

We hope Project Candle will extend and co-ordinate the existing patchwork of
efforts relating to power consumption. Although it is originating in Platform
Engineering, like all other cross-cutting quality initiatives it will need
involvement from people all over Mozilla engineering to be successful. If you
are at all interested in power consumption, I encourage you to do one or more
of the following things.

- Easy (5 minutes or less):
- Read the wiki page [2].
- Join the mailing list [3].

- Medium (1 hour or less):
- Read the tools documentation on MDN [4]. (Feedback is welcome!)
- Read through the bug lists (linked from the wiki
page; currently the "Unprioritized" list is the only non-empty one).

- Harder:
- Work on a bug from one of the bug lists.
- Think about Q4 goals that might involve power consumption.

I will start the first bug triage thread on the mailing list early next week.

Please contact me if you have any questions or other feedback. Thank you.

Nick

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Roadmap
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Project_Candle
[3] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-power
[4] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance,
under "Power profiling"

[Chris Mills]

Nice work Nick - some really good content here.

I’ve spent a good chunk of today reading through and giving it a copy edit.

Chris Mills
Senior tech writer || Mozilla
developer.mozilla.org || MDN
cmi...@mozilla.com || @chrisdavidmills

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[Terrence Cole]

Thanks for spearheading this, Nick!

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[Nicholas Nethercote]

I've posted the first bug triage email thread for Project Candle:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.power/OX_XvkjM3i0

If you want to follow along, please subscribe to the mailing list at
dev-power at https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-power.

Nick

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 11:14 AM, Nicholas Nethercote