976058 - Reduce wakeup overhead due to spinning wheel on tab load

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1503259

(Core :: Layout, defect)

Description

[Roberto Agostino Vitillo (:rvitillo)]

Following BenWa's suggestion, I measured the overhead of the spinning wheel that is displayed when a tab is being loaded. Animating the spinning wheel at about 60 FPS has an overhead of 75% wrt to idle so it might make sense to consider lowering the number of wakeups for that animation.

Comment 1

[Benoit Girard (:BenWa)]

I think this is a front-end change. We should consider the impact of lowering the frame rate of the animation. Scrolling FPS is very important but throbber FPS I'd imagine not so much. We should see how low we can push the animation's frame-rate.

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

FWIW: I believe the Firefox for Android team addressed this by doing away with the throbber (spinning wheel) altogether, and replacing it with a load-bar of some sort (which only moves when progress is actually made).

Comment 3

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

FWIW, here are some simple charts showing Fennec loading CNN.com (desktop site) with and without the spinner/throbber:

http://people.mozilla.org/~mfinkle/fennec/power/nexuss-power-load-cnn-throbber-fennec.png
http://people.mozilla.org/~mfinkle/fennec/power/nexuss-power-load-cnn-fennec.png

The "throbber" chart shows the power consumption maintaining a high, constant max usage. The without chart shows the power usage dipping as the system is able to reduce the load occasionally.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Isn't this gone - there is no more spinner?

Comment 6

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #5)
> Isn't this gone - there is no more spinner?

The icon has just changed -- now it's a dot bouncing back and forth from left to right.  It's still an animated image displayed in the tab favicon area, though.

Comment 7

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Dupe of bug 1503259? Also on bug 1812019 we are most likely going to stop the animation if the page hasn't been loaded in a given time range.