Are We Fast Yet and Perfherder

Mar 30th, 2016

Mozilla Perfherder

Historically at Mozilla, we’ve had a bunch of different systems running to benchmark Firefox’s performance. The two most broadly-scoped are Talos (which runs as part of our build process, and emphasizes common real-world use cases, like page loading) and Are We Fast Yet (which runs seperately, and emphasizes JavaScript performance and benchmarks).

As many of you know, most of my focus over the last year-and-a-bit has been developing a system called Perfherder, which aims to make monitoring and acting on performance data easier. A great introduction to Perfherder is my project of the month post.

The initial focus of Perfherder has been Talos, which is deeply integrated into our automation and also maintained by Engineering Productivity (my group). However, the intention was always to allow anyone in the Mozilla community to submit performance data for Firefox and sheriff it, much like Treeherder has supported the submission of test result data from third parties (e.g. autophone, Firefox UI tests). There are more commonalities than differences in how we do performance sheriffing with Are We Fast Yet (which currently has its own web interface) and Perfherder, so it made sense to see if we could pool resources.

So, over the last couple of months, Joel Maher and I have been in discussions with Hannes Verschore, current maintainer of Are We Fast Yet (AWFY) to see what could be done. It looks like it is possible for Perfherder to provide most of what AWFY needs, though there are a few exceptions. I thought for the benefit of others, it might be useful to outline what’s done, what’s coming next, and what might not be implemented (at least not any time soon).

What’s done

What’s in progress (or in the near-term pipeline)

Under consideration

Probably won’t fix