Results

The first shows the raw test run data (which isn’t terribly interesting). The second compares the reported startup time for each test. You will probably want to click to zoom in.

Conclusions

Like I said, the results are both good and bad. Good in that I now have a pretty good idea on why people have bad startup times. Bad in that we don’t have any way to quickly improve the issues that people are seeing. What I see from this data is that profiles in the wild, with add-ons disabled aren’t much slower than a clean profile. This seems to implicate add-ons being at least part of the problem (which we knew) or possibly all of the problem at this point (for the profiles tested). The good news is that the add-ons team is already working on solutions to this, and you should expect some blog posts from them about this soon.

Next Step

Next week I’m going to spend some time getting numbers with these profiles on the latest release of Firefox 3.6 with and without add-ons disabled to compare. This will pretty much confirm or deny my hypothesis of this week’s results.

News on the Past

In my last post, we looked at my profile with various pieces removed to try and figure out why startup might be slow for people. With those results, I identified two issues that would impact startup the most:

1. Large cookies.sqlite
2. Many tabs being restored

I also have good news about both of these issues! The cookies.sqlite issue is now fixed and will be a part of beta 4, and Paul has some good data about session restore and tabs (with more to come).

The Tests

• Clean profile. This is just the standard profile that we normally run Ts with on tinderbox. This is basically used a baseline for best possible performance.
• Dirty profile. This is actually my daily profile, with eight tabs that will open through session restore during startup. Because of how talos works, these tabs don’t all have to load for the number to be generated. Even so, you’ll notice a substantial slowdown. Sadly, I fear I modified the profile I was using in a bad way because I can no longer reproduce the numbers I got (but the numbers recorded were reproduced four times before I moved on to the rest of the tests initially).
• Bookmarks toolbar disabled. This is a variation on the dirty profile test that just disables the bookmarks toolbar.
• No places. This is a variation on the dirty profile test that removes places files from the profile.
• No sessionstore.js. This is a variation on the dirty profile test that removes sessionstore.js from the profile. This has the side effect of also not making the eight tabs load at startup.
• No urlclassifier. This is a variation on the dirty profile test that removes the urlclassifier related files from the profile.
• No cookies.sqlite. This is a variation on the dirty profile test that removes cookies.sqlite from the profile.
• No extensions. This is a variation on the dirty profile test that removes all add-on manager bits in the profile.
• No formhistory.sqlite. This is a variation on the dirty profile test that removes formhistory.sqlite from the profile.
• No downloads.sqlite. This is a variation on the dirty profile test that removes downloads.sqlite from the profile.
• No content-prefs.sqlite. This is a variation on the ditry profile test that removes content-prefs.sqlite from the profile.

Results

I’m going to let some graphs do the talking here. The first shows the raw test run data (which isn’t terribly interesting). The second compares the reported startup time for each test. You will probably want to click to zoom in.

Conclusions

It looks like the best wins that we can get are related to fixing session restore to not scale linearly with the number of tabs it is restoring, and reduce the startup time costs of loading places files and cookies.sqlite. It should be noted that this test was not measuring the load time for each tab, so something like BarTab would not help in this case. The other good news is that we already have work underway to make cookies.sqlite load time not hurt us so much during startup.

Unfortunately, I immediately hit a bit of a speed bump. I think a picture best explains this:

This is a chart of the 20 runs talos does when measuring startup time. As you can see, the dirty profile kept on increasing each and every run. After about a day of investigating this, the cause is finally known: tabs. Turns out, talos tries to quit the browser before calling window.close(), which results in the tabs not closing. As a result, at the end of the 20 cycles, we were loading 19 more tabs than the first cycle. I filed a bug about this behavior against talos. It does not matter now, but if we ever decide to change the default preference in Firefox to load your windows and tabs from last time this will come back to bite us.

I did learn something useful out of all of this though: startup time scales linearly with the number of tabs session restore has to restore. I confirmed this by running talos with 200 cycles instead of the normal 20, and it was clearly a linear increase. We should probably figure out a way to mitigate that, but I have not filed a bug on it (yet!).