I'm helping to land a Test Pilot experiment (Page Shot, now dubbed Firefox Screenshots) in Firefox.
We're landing it as a system addon~, preffed off, but it still has some unknown impact on memory consumption and startup performance.
This will be my first time profiling anything in Gecko, and it seems like it might be worth writing down my steps, both for others wanting to try it out, and to identify rough spots in the APIs or missing bits of documentation.
Steps:
- about:memory profiling, some docs on MDN seem promising
- about:performance profiling, a recent airmo talk and not much else to go on...
As a starting point, I tried installing the about:startup addon (MDN docs), then started Firefox about 10 times with screenshots preffed on and preffed off.
To my surprise, there is a difference of about 20 milliseconds between the firstPaint times with and without Screenshots preffed on: 1579 vs 1600 milliseconds (a simple average).