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petard · 03:43 PM

I've been trying some performance improvements to Camino, and I think I've hit on one that makes a real difference, but I need to get a variety of testers to have a look and see.

In the past we've speculated that the way Camino handles gecko events may be responsible for some of the various performance issues people report with Camino. This includes but is not limited to CPU usage during flash playback.

I've got a patch up:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271050

which drastically changes how gecko events are dispatched. Because this code is invoked so frequently and the change is so dramatic, I need a lot of testing before this will sound like a good idea :-).

It would help out a lot if as many folks as possible could either build and test or download the disk image here:
http://www.speakeasy.org/~gbeier/Cam...rftest.dmg.bz2

and browse with the two builds included there. The one in the "Old event handling" folder should be very similar to tonight's nightly. The only difference between that one and the one in the "New event handling" folder is the above patch; this should make it easily to isolate performance differences introduced by this change.

Anyone who gets to kick it around, please report results back either to this thread or on the bug itself.

Thanks in advance!

wtmcgee · Nov 21, 2004, 03:37 PM

downloading. I'll get to you in the IRC channel with whatever i find.

Ludovic Hirlimann · Nov 21, 2004, 04:42 PM

Originally posted by petard:

http://www.speakeasy.org/~gbeier/Cam...rftest.dmg.bz2

The download weigt's 14 MB

akuma-x · Nov 21, 2004, 09:15 PM

Very nice. I notice a huge speed increase on my G3 700 iBook.
I also noticed that you have been able to do what even Firefox still has not. The scroll speed when using the up/down arrows on the keyboard are now synced with the keyboard repeat rate as they should. The keyboard scroll still needs a bit of work on sites like IGN.com. But dude! Bravo! I could smack the Firefox guys for not fixing that yet (even on windows machines).
So to answer your question, yes it's much improved! Thank you for your hard work!

yukon · Nov 21, 2004, 10:25 PM

Looks interesting. Read the bugzilla thread, it sounds like a move forward. Sorry I can't test it, can't wait to see the speedup in the next version though (Camino is already fast for me).

Ludovic Hirlimann · Nov 23, 2004, 10:42 AM

Originally posted by yukon:
Looks interesting. Read the bugzilla thread, it sounds like a move forward. Sorry I can't test it, can't wait to see the speedup in the next version though (Camino is already fast for me).

Anewer patch has been included in http://www.speakeasy.org/~gbeier/Cam...essage.dmg.bz2

yukon · Nov 23, 2004, 08:33 PM

Yeah, sorry to sound like a jerk, I don't mean in /~user, I mean in ftp.mozilla.org/camino. I haven't read the patch itself (I won't understand it fully anyway), I don't have any way of verifying that you made the patch/compiled/host the binary at least without researching (I use iCab and am waiting for Firefox 1.1 on the mac, Camino lacks in features for me, as does Safari (which is slower than Camino here)). If it does increase performance without problems then it'll be included into Camino and I'll enjoy it, otherwise any posting of a patched binary that "increases performance" is suspect to me.

From Petard's post, it sounds like he has modernized and improved a crucial part of the application, from the bugzilla it sounds like he's modernized and perhaps improved the crucial part in some instances. Awesome, I can only encourage good work like that and I appreciate it. I appologize for my caution, but I don't recognize any of the names in this thread.

nooon · 11:43 AM

Originally posted by yukon:
I use iCab and am waiting for Firefox 1.1 on the mac, Camino lacks in features for me, as does Safari (which is slower than Camino here).

Have you tried OmniWeb?

Anyways: Thanks for this build! It made me go back to Camino from Firefox

yukon · Nov 24, 2004, 07:21 PM

Absolutly tried Omniweb, it was the only browser on OS X when I was first playing with it. Tried it just lately, it's actually really good, fast and featureful, almost switched. Sent in a few complaints about how the pattern matching was set up (gotta let me import/export), about the option for real tabs (most webpages look the same in a thumbnail), and a couple other suggestions. I like iCab because of the features (filtermanager, downloadmanager) and it's extreme speed (open tab, open window), it's just outdated ....Safari is absolute crap on my machine (450mhz) as it stops responding when a page loads. Firefox is awesome on other platforms but is slow and buggy in OS X (again, can't wait for 1.1). Camino is a lot like Safari, but better looking, based on gecko (slower to launch), and much faster when in the application, I'd use it if it had extension support (adblock,bugmenot, developer) and about:config available. Shiira was decent, impressive until I tried omniweb, a good option...Moz was big and bloaty last I tried it, way too slow for me.....Dillo is nice, but only on pre-pIII machines, Veli was similar....I'll never touch IE, Opera was terrible last I tried.... That about covers them all. Browsers are somewhat subjective or depend on your needs, this is all just my simplified opinions here.

dru · Nov 25, 2004, 12:26 PM

There's a clear improvement. I've had some crashes with your build but they may well be unrelated to the patch.

Anything that can be done to improve the snail's ooze performance of flash sites on Mac OS X is a good thing!

Any possibility your improvement can be rolled back into other Gecko-based browsers?

petard · Nov 26, 2004, 05:22 PM

First off, thanks very much to everyone who's been able to test and post reports so far. The feedback has been and continues to be very valuable. (Aside: no need to apologize if you don't want to trust my binaries and test... anyone who doesn't recognize my posting history in bugzilla definitely should use the patch to build their own. The binaries were just a courtesy! :-))

Originally posted by dru:
Any possibility your improvement can be rolled back into other Gecko-based browsers?

I don't know whether they can or not, or whether they'd help other gecko based browsers. I can assure you, though, that these changes are on the right folks' radars so that if they're effective in FF or the suite you'll see them there. Since netscape just seems to pick up the suite, i suspect that if they hit the suite and netscape ever produces another version of their browser you'll see them in netscape as well. But I don't know who to talk to there.

Thanks again all, and please keep the reports coming!