1624051 - Warm up uncached shaders during idle render periods

Status: NEW

(Core :: Graphics: WebRender, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

On macOS, scrolling and other animations can jank when new shaders are encountered for the first time since Firefox was launched. It would be nice to front-load all of this jank.

Maybe we can do this during "idle" times shortly after startup.

On platforms with "program binary" shader disk caching, we could also do this, but only when the cache is empty. This would also help profile conditioning for automated performance tests on Android: it would make sure that cold page load tests don't hit shader compilation because those shaders would already have been cached into the profile during the profile conditioning run.

Comment 1

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

I'm going to look into this a bit.

Comment 2

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Didn't end up looking into it after all, unassigning for now.

Comment 3

[Daniel Lu]

Strategy for idle detection?

Comment 4

[Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel]]

So we can register an idle observer in the parent process:
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/nsIdleService.cpp#398
and use it to send idle messages to the gpu process/WebRender.

Comment 5

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug assignee didn't login in Bugzilla in the last 7 months.
:bhood, could you have a look please?
For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 6

[Bob Hood [:bhood]]

Daniel appears to have dropped the ball here. Markus, as the reporter, do you think this needs to remain on the back burner?

Comment 7

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Yes, shader compilation during startup is still very visible in startup profiles and needs to be addressed at some point.