Little extension to expose startup time
A few days ago, Taras landed a new API to gather startup timings for a few events occurring when Firefox starts.
The timings that are currently reported through this API are the following:
- process is when the Firefox process starts
- main is when the
XRE_mainfunction is called (one of the first functions actively called) - firstPaint is when a web page has been displayed for the first time to the user
- sessionRestored is pretty much self describing
There are apparently still a few rough edges, but it is still quite valuable information. As such, I wrote a little (restart-less) extension that displays these information when you go to the about:startup url. It doesn't really display the raw values, but instead the number of milliseconds elapsed since the process startup until each further event above.
In the long run, we should have a fully fledged extension doing that.
2011-01-19 16:12:12+0900
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2011-01-19 18:07:51+0900
Thx for the extensions
My numbers:
main 1890
sessionRestored 19531
firstPaint 31437
This is on Win XP, Intel Pentium Dual-Core Mobile T2370(1,7 GHz) and 1 GB of RAM
2011-01-19 20:44:54+0900
firstPaint isn’t quite when a web page is displayed to the user. It is when the first paint of the browser happens, that paint could be chrome only, it could be a 1×1 pixel square, it could be painting grey over the entire window.
2011-01-19 21:33:47+0900
Mine were:
main 734
sessionRestored 5104
firstPaint 5201
2011-01-19 23:14:58+0900
Works well with Instantbird (http://www.instantbird.com) nightly builds too :)
2011-01-20 01:34:38+0900
This seems like something that should be run through the Test Pilot program. It’s a very good idea to get real-world startup time data like this.
2011-01-22 17:34:51+0900
Are the numbers in ms? miliseconds?
2011-01-23 12:02:33+0900
Hello
I agree to the comment 5 (Test Pilot Studies).
This is a realy good idea.
2011-01-30 00:22:17+0900
main 89
sessionRestored 2637
firstPaint 3476
2011-01-30 00:24:10+0900
Could this be submitted to addons.mozilla.org? Support channels could direct users with slow startup to this addon to get information about which part of the startup is slowest, and an AMO-hosted addon has more credibility.
2011-02-12 00:35:49+0900
any seamonkey support?
2011-02-12 00:54:37+0900
never mind got it to work.
main 31
sessionRestored 2185
firstPaint 2294
amd Phenom II X4 B50 3.1 GHz
4 GB RAM
seamonkey 2.1b3
2011-02-12 01:11:03+0900
sorry forgot OS.
Win 7 x86
hot cache
2011-02-14 23:07:49+0900
main 2278
firstPaint 23417
sessionRestored 23557
cold cache
2011-02-18 22:20:05+0900
main 952
firstPaint 14603
sessionRestored 14665
cold cache
the previous cold cache was with malwarebytes’ Anit-Malware running. it really slows things down
2011-03-26 15:28:52+0900
this addon don’t work on today’s nightly build.
sorry my English.
2011-03-27 12:21:54+0900
z_mashine: Check out https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/about-startup
Version 0.1.2 fixes this. (As of writing, it hasn’t been reviewed and thus is not available yet, but you can get it from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/about-startup/versions/0.1.2)
2011-03-27 13:01:02+0900
Thank you! :)
2011-04-06 08:36:38+0900
Hi Mike,
my mobile (in development) browser fennec-qt announces itself as “Firefox/4.0b8pre Fennec/4.0b3pre”. I can’t find any version of the about-startup extension that I can install. Do you have any pointers about manually building and installing it?
2011-04-08 17:46:01+0900
You need at least Fennec 4.0b4 (or some few nightlies before that).
2011-08-11 02:47:03+0900
Will you be updating this at all? Will you be moving it beyond Experimental? I’ve seen a few feature requests on AMO, and I also would like to recommend that the first startup time after a patch install get excluded.