857873 - Make an AWFY client for user-submitted data

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, defect)

Description

[Sean Stangl [:sstangl]]

Our current AWFY setup is extremely limited in the number of hardware configurations that are tested. In particular, we lack testing on any of the older processors that likely comprise the majority of our WinXP-using base.

Instead of us solving this problem by getting more hardware and maintaining it ourselves, we could solve it in a more interesting way by providing a downloadable AWFY client that would run the benchmarks on a local computer and report the results (and hardware data) to the AWFY server.

This would be better for us, because we get more testing, and better for people interested in JS engine performance, because they can submit their hardware for tracking. It would then be possible to track how JS engine improvements affect their configurations personally, which to me sounds fairly engaging.

The client would just have to update repositories, reconfigure, and build. To run, we would want to set the cpufreq governor to "performance" and run the shell with a very low niceness in a restricted cgroup.

For Android/Mobile support, we could also consider hosting the benchmarks on the AWFY site and providing a submission button. We wouldn't get to-the-hour information, but it could at least be done at a granularity of Nightly's release schedule.