985542 - Android reftests display about:home during tests

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Testing, defect)

Description

[Geoff Brown [:gbrown]]

When Android reftests are run with the options found on tbpl, about:home is displayed (on Top Sites) and the test images are not visible.

When run via "make reftest-remote", about:home is not displayed, but neither are the test images visible -- blank content is displayed.

The main difference between tbpl and "make reftest-remote" is that --bootstrap is passed to reftestremote.py on tbpl.

None of this seems to affect test results, but I think the about:home display is of concern for performance reasons: As each test is loaded, the top sites list is updated, favicons are re-loaded, etc.  Android 2.3 reftests run without --bootstrap run about 4x faster than normal.

Logcat (with --bootstrap) shows frequent GeckoGlobalHistory and favicon activity:

03-18 16:12:06.225 W/GeckoGlobalHistory(  428): Rebuilding visited link set...
03-18 16:12:06.352 E/GeckoConsole(  428): [JavaScript Error: "The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the page must be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol." {file: "http://10.0.2.2:8854/tests/layout/reftests/position-dynamic-changes/vertical/topN-heightA-bottomN.html?border_parent" line: 0}]
03-18 16:12:07.356 E/GeckoConsole(  428): [JavaScript Warning: "Use of Mutation Events is deprecated. Use MutationObserver instead." {file: "chrome://reftest/content/reftest-content.js" line: 524}]
03-18 16:12:07.519 D/GeckoFavicons(  428): Cancelling favicon load (264)
03-18 16:12:07.540 D/GeckoFavicons(  428): Cancelling favicon load (263)
03-18 16:12:07.579 D/GeckoFavicons(  428): Cancelling favicon load (262)
03-18 16:12:07.616 D/GeckoFavicons(  428): Cancelling favicon load (261)
03-18 16:12:07.616 D/GeckoFavicons(  428): Cancelling favicon load (260)
03-18 16:12:07.631 D/GeckoFavicons(  428): Cancelling favicon load (259)
03-18 16:12:12.087 D/GeckoFavicons(  428): Cancelling favicon load (289)
03-18 16:12:12.105 D/GeckoFavicons(  428): Cancelling favicon load (288)
03-18 16:12:12.127 D/GeckoFavicons(  428): Cancelling favicon load (287)
03-18 16:12:12.135 D/GeckoFavicons(  428): Cancelling favicon load (286)
03-18 16:12:12.175 D/GeckoFavicons(  428): Cancelling favicon load (285)
03-18 16:12:12.205 D/GeckoFavicons(  428): Cancelling favicon load (284)

Comment 1

[Geoff Brown [:gbrown]]

(In reply to Geoff Brown [:gbrown] from comment #0)
> Android 2.3
> reftests run without --bootstrap run about 4x faster than normal.

This statement is entirely false. A recent merge from m-c caused an improvement of between 2x and 4x for Android 2.3 reftests. Running without --bootstrap has little measurable effect on reftest performance.

Displaying about:home, updating the database, laying out Top Sites and reloading favicons for each reftest still seems like a bad thing.

Comment 2

[Geoff Brown [:gbrown]]

Reftest behavior in current builds is improved, but about:home is still displayed. This does not seem to contribute to any performance issue and reftests are still functional, so I am not going to pursue a change here.