925843 - Increase Gecko thread priority during page loads

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

Attachment: benchmarks on SGS

Increasing the Gecko thread priority during page load results in pretty huge performance gains on a Samsung Galaxy S (numbers attached -- sorry for the ad-hoc text tables).

The patch had no effect on newer devices such as the Galaxy Nexus or HTC One.

Comment 1

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

Attachment: Hacky patch to change priority with throbbers

Here's the hacky patch being used for the benchmarks. It hooks into throbber start/stop, which we probably don't want to do for the final solution. We'll also want to have some kind of stack for the Gecko priority so multiple calls to changeGeckoPriority() don't cause conflicts.

Comment 2

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

These numbers are encouraging, but there's an issue (albeit an expected one) with this patch: the UI becomes very laggy and unresponsive during page loads. This is easy to see when loading CNN since CNN often takes around a minute to finish.

For this approach to really work well, we'll probably want some way to reset Gecko's priority whenever the user is interacting with the UI, and that may not be trivial.

Comment 3

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.