Thunderbird/Development/Performance

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We need to keep an eye on Thunderbird's performance as we develop it. Whilst we pick up many improvements from Firefox in the core code, our own code is very capable of slowing us down.

At a minimum we need to keep ballpark values of various actions for each platform to ensure that we are not regressing from version to version.

History

Performance has been discussed several times in the past. In particular, see:

• MailNews:Performance_Testing
• MailNews:Performance_Testing:Meeting_2008_01_09

3.3 Focus

Goals:

• Finish off current performance improvement efforts
• Produce performance assessment comparisons between 3.1 and 3.3.
  • These should at least be semi-automated.

Existing performance efforts

• Asuth has done some work on folder-switching-performance, see bug 562965

Produce performance comparisons

Possible areas perceived as critical to the user:

1. How long does it take to switch between folders? (esp. different sizes)
2. Switching between messages via keyboard and mouse (maybe this is the same, but is it?)
3. Tab switching performance?
   • (possibly related to item 1).
4. Start up performance
   • Some work has already been done on this, see:
     • MailNews:Start-up_Time
     • bug 462862
5. Gloda Search Performance (this would have to be against a known DB and set of messages).
6.  Indexing performance
   • Although this is background, the amount of time TB spends using CPU is considered as critical for some users.

The start up performance work was designed to hook into Talos, however it is unclear at the time of writing if Talos would really suit our needs for the rest of the performance measurements.