Archive for September, 2010
Built In
Saturday, September 25th, 2010
Neat, and fast. Link.
Finding Performance Gains
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010
About nine months ago we started adding Win7 feature support to Firefox’s TRUNK source tree. At that time we weren’t running Win7 Talos performance stats on TRUNK builds, so we were basically landing code in the blind as far as performance was concerned. After Win7 was released, we added Win7 to Talos in early 2010 and started accumulating data… fast forward nine months. Over the last couple weeks I’ve been digging into Win7 startup regressions, trying to pin down some pesky initial paint problems related to glass and various other new features. Can you imagine my surprise, when I stumbled over this wonderful bit of code, which I wrote, that makes synchronous calls to our favorites database in generating Win7 jump lists while the browser’s main UI starts up. You would think something so innocuous would be, well, innocent. Well, not so, I landed a patch this week that delays calls to this code on browser startup, and well guess what – I got these Talos peformance results on cold startup with a heavily populated user profile:
That scale on the left is in milliseconds! Blam! The fx favorites db wasn’t as fast as I expected. Such is life. I’ve filed off an additional bug on making these calls faster so jump lists get updated without dragging down the main UI. Lesson learned. Browsers are hard, and fun too. 
The Mayor
Thursday, September 9th, 2010
Great shot from Valle Crucis, North Carolina, courtesy of the BlueRidgeBlog.
Rights
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
“Why were you in China?” asked the passport control officer, a woman with the appearance and disposition of a prison matron.
“None of your business,” I said.
Her eyes widened in disbelief.
Where’s the market headed?
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
“The leading indicators – new orders, unfilled orders and vender deliveries all fell and point to further severe weakness in the headline measure ahead. It was the coincident and lagging indicators such as production, inventories and employment that drove up the headline number. Some of the regional subcomponents (eg Philadelphia Fed workweek) are SCREAMING that recession is imminent.”
