PGO builds of Firefox
Goal: We should evaluate the benefits and feasibility of building Firefox using PGO, and start working on this
Blueprint information
- Status:
- Complete
- Approver:
- Micah Gersten
- Priority:
- Medium
- Drafter:
- Chris Coulson
- Direction:
- Approved
- Assignee:
- Chris Coulson
- Definition:
- Approved
- Series goal:
- Accepted for quantal
- Implementation:
-
Implemented
- Milestone target:
-
quantal-alpha-3
- Started by
- Chris Coulson
- Completed by
- Kate Stewart
Related branches
Sprints
Whiteboard
PGO builds require a fairly deterministic build environment, and so are generally unsuitable for PPA builds. If we turned on PGO, this would mean that release builds that we push out as updates would have a different build configuration to all of our other builds (nightly / aurora / beta) that we provide in PPA's. One way to mitigate this is to devirtualize the beta PPA (which should be done for other reasons, anyway).
We will only go with this if:
1) There are measurable performance benefits
2) We get a de-virtualized beta PPA, so that we can have representative beta testing for future updates
Here are some performance comparisons of various build configurations: https:/
Old WIs for natty-alpha-1:
[chrisccoulson] Add support in the packaging for building with PGO: DONE
pitti, 2011-02-18: Too unstable right now, and no subjectively noticeable performance improvement; dropping for natty
Work Items
Work items for quantal-alpha-1:
[chrisccoulson] Turn on PGO as an experiment: DONE
[chrisccoulson] Perform some benchmarking: DONE
Work items for quantal-alpha-3:
[chrisccoulson] Enquire about de-virtualizing the Firefox beta PPA: POSTPONED
[chrisccoulson] Make a decision on whether to keep PGO on: DONE