723742 - Set various debugging logs as a preference and have them turned off for the release version of Fennec Native

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P5)

Description

[Naoki Hirata :nhirata (please use needinfo instead of cc)]

As above.

To increase performance, we should turn stuff from logging so much, unless it's needed for troubleshooting purposes.

I am uncertain how much we would gain from it, but I noticed that not having gralloc being logged to having gralloc being logged makes certain things like flickering more noticeable.

Comment 1

[Tony Chung [:tchung]]

(In reply to Naoki Hirata :nhirata from comment #0)
> As above.
> 
> To increase performance, we should turn stuff from logging so much, unless
> it's needed for troubleshooting purposes.
> 
> I am uncertain how much we would gain from it, but I noticed that not having
> gralloc being logged to having gralloc being logged makes certain things
> like flickering more noticeable.

Other than gralloc, are there other known examples of extraneous logging that we default with on?  Maybe provide a few more specific examples?

i do agree if it can save us a little more performance wins, we should do it.

Comment 2

[Naoki Hirata :nhirata (please use needinfo instead of cc)]

Some more examples:
- bug 722414 : performance 
- Panning 
- zooming
- typing (on a VKB)
- tabs switching/awesome page loading
- loading a page (viewport/GeckoBrowserProvider)

Comment 3

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

According to http://developer.android.com/reference/android/util/Log.html "debug logs are compiled in but stripped at runtime". I assume this only happens on devices for which development mode is not turned on. I think a lot of the logs are already debug-level, can we verify whether or not they show up on a non-developement device?

Although even if doesn't show up, it might still be worth removing since the log lines will still (I think) create strings before throwing them away which will stress the GC.

Comment 4

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

chris, can you confirm?

Comment 5

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

The Android docs' comment that "Debug logs are compiled in but stripped at runtime" is just a poorly-worded recommendation. Google says this is a doc bug and that "logs cannot be 'stripped' at runtime":

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=14015

You can verify this by watching third-party applications' debug messages in `adb logcat`.

ProGuard can be configured to strip out _calls_ to android.util.Log() at compile-time, but (as kats points out) the string-building of log messages will remain.

Google recommends checking Log.isLoggable() or a LOGD flag before calling to a logging method to see if the tag will be logged:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/util/Log.html#isLoggable%28java.lang.String,%20int%29

I think bug can be closed as a duplicate of bug 721461 (Add LOGD checks so Fennec can skip logging (and log message construction) when logcat is not listening).

Comment 6

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

WONTFIX because bug 815684 will bundle logcat message with our crash reports.