Platform/2013-02-26

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Notices/Schedule

• (catlee) Proposed tree closure for Tuesday March 5th 16:00 - 24:00 PT for bugzilla downtime
• (gps) Proposed tree closure for (soon) for moz.build landing bug 784841.

• FF20b1 for desktop released Friday, FF20b1 for mobile released yesterday with important update fixes
• FF21.0a2 unthrottled last Friday
• ESR10->17 updates unthrottled yesterday

• A FF19.0.1 re-spin to resolve critical issues is NOT expected for mobile
• A FF19.0.1 desktop re-spin is expected today for bug 830531
  • Once spun up, we'll need positive verification that the re-spin prevents the issue
  • If there are no other drivers (PDF.js stuck!), we can unthrottle FF19.0 for non-Win8 as soon as possible (moving forward with this now)

• FF20b2 expected to go to build today, released before the end of the week

29 bugs (21 bugs last week)	63 bugs (59 bugs last week)
Unresolved Aurora 54 Trackers (non-security, not tracked for Beta)	Unresolved Beta 134 Trackers (non-security)

Key Issues

Products/Projects

Firefox OS

Firefox Desktop

• Background tab thumbnailing WIP: bug 841495

Firefox Mobile

Blog Shout Out

• Overdraw explained: http://sriramramani.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/overdraw/
• Two-Way View Intro: http://lucasr.org/2013/02/21/introducing-twowayview/

Stability Wins

• The team worked hard to pull together patches to address the DB locking crashes for Firefox 20 beta 1 which shipped yesterday:
  • bug 843029 - Add more retries to ensureDatabaseIsNotLocked
  • bug 843361 - Dump list of open files if we fail to unlock the DB
  • bug 732902 - java.lang.IllegalStateException: at android.widget.ListView.layoutChildren(ListView.java) with Adapter
  • bug 836924 - java.lang.NullPointerException: at org.mozilla.gecko.Tabs.getContentResolver(Tabs.java:212)
• Awesome find/fix hit trunk for: bug 839882

Memory, Responsiveness, and Usability

• Nice responsiveness improvement hit central yesterday with the landing of bug 843888 - LayerView has 1 overdraw
• We are very stoked \o/ on the landing of bug 716859 and the patch for bug 829747. The build we are showing at MWC contains both these patches

Great progress on

• WebRTC is being showcased this week at MWC, we'll work on a schedule after folks regroup post-the show

Stability Report [Weekly]

• Bugs needing help/attention:
  • bug 837370 (js::types::TypeCompartment::addPendingRecompile), assigned to dvander, high on Aurora 21
  • bug 787158 (nsHttpConnection::OnSocketWritable), assigned to mcmanus, high on Beta 20 and later, probably triggered by Facebook SPDY trials
  • bug 844580 (js::ObjectImpl::nativeLookup), preliminarily assigned to dvander, high on Beta 20 and later, might just be another generic signature for JM crashes but we want to be sure of that before ignoring it for the moment
• A class of crashes with integrated AMD Radeon graphics is creating huge spikes of crashes in release builds recently (e.g. bug 830531 on 19 release with Win8, bug 839270 on 19.0b5 mainly with Win7). This looks like a chipset or kernel-mode driver problem corrupting read-only memory and making us crash, we have tried to contact AMD people, no resolution thus far, but they are investigating.
• If you're interested in more details about our stability efforts, please join the CrashKill meeting every Monday at 10am Pacific in the Stability Vidyo room (also see dev.planning announcements).

Snappy [Bi-Weekly]

• Feb 21 Minutes

Startup & Shutdown

• bug 810454: Read-ahead entire sqlite cookie DB on DB connection open
  • Experiments show 50% faster DB open time for a larger cookie DB (1.5MB)
  • 87% regression for smaller cookies DB (512KB), but small in absolute terms. See bug for data & details.
  • Plan to do a Telemetry trial to verify benefit in the field
  • Pre-loading LocalStorage DB bug 842777 and Flash shared library bug 836488

Tab Strip

• bug 828097: We now have Telemetry for Tab animation smoothness
  • Tab animation intervals are good when opening a blank page, not very good when newtab preview is enabled (regardless of browser.newtab.preload), especially on slow systems.
  • Telemetry: http://goo.gl/LHjTZ
• bug 838758: Gradient cache keys were too precise. Avi landed a patch to key the gradient cache on gradient stops instead.
  • This patch eliminates big memory spikes on some systems (HD4000) - bug 837542
  • D2D speedup 20-25% for tab animation.
• bug 837885: We're working with fx-team (MattN, mconley) on Australis performance
  • Benchmarks: http://goo.gl/TOXLe
  • Now at about 15-20% regression from default theme on slow systems
• Timer interval irregularities hurt animation smoothness:
  • bug 842967 - timer may retarget the same timestamp
  • bug 590422 - remove timer compensation/smoother

Content

• bug 842852: Improve LocalStorage performance by check-pointing the WAL log more frequently + preventing latch-up of reader and writer threads.

Hangs

• bug 825588: Paolo landed the skeleton for a new downloads API. Iterating on features and will eventually port over callers
• bug 789348, bug 820834: Marco working on removing uses of LocalStorage from about:home

Add-ons

• bug 810149: Addon Manager recursively scans unpacked addon directories for changes on startup. We would like to only check extension install manifests
  • However, we're seeing very high number of Telemetry reports of unpacked addons getting updated without any changes to their install.rdf.
  • If you see "addonManager: {"modifiedExceptInstallRdf": n > 0, ...}" in your about:telemetry's "Simple Measurements" section after starting Firefox, please contact Irving or Vladan.

Tools

• We'll soon begin receiving reports of any Firefox late-writes (part of making shutdown faster)

Other

• bug 840651: Telemetry ping storm from a few machines, idle-dily firing too much?

Metro [1st Tuesday of each month]

Games [1st Tuesday of Month]

Mobile Web Compat [2nd Tuesday of Month]

Critsmash [3rd Tuesday of Month]

Memshrink [4th Tuesday of Month]

Some recent big wins:

• Timothy Nikkel fixed bug 689623, which greatly reduces memory consumption on image-heavy pages. This is a big deal -- it was the #1 item on the MemShrink "big ticket items" list!

• Two bad areweslimyet.com regressions from December were fixed by Seth Fowler and Peter Van der Beken.

• Chris Jones fixed a bad B2G leak that was causing B2G phones to become unusable after a couple of days of use.

Custom runs (from try builds) can now be requested on areweslimyet.com.

MemShrink reports: week 85--86, week 87--88.

If you are interested in attending MemShrink meetings, please feel free to do so. The next one is Tuesday, March 5th at 2pm PST (watch for Jet's announcement email to dev-planning). The MemShrink regulars have some expertise when it comes to the DOM, JS engine, cycle collector, B2G and Fennec, but participation and engagement from people who know about things such as gfx, images, layout, jetpack, and front-end would be extremely welcome. Feel free to contact nnethercote if you want more information.

Roundtable

• 3rd and final reminder that next week's meeting will be in the Engineering Vidyo room (lmandel)
• (catlee) More linux32 test slaves online now. bug 843054
• TSan (thread sanitizer) Firefox now builds on Linux. Useful for debugging race conditions which might be the underlying cause of many intermittent test failures. Contact choller or cdiehl for more information.