One of the features of the upcoming Firefox 6 is an improvement to the handling and reporting of memory resources. As you can probably imagine, this is very applicable to the endurance tests project. As a result of the changes, running the endurance tests with the previews of Firefox 6 was failing to gather any metrics at all.
I’m pleased to announce that as of yesterday, the endurance tests now support Firefox 6! One of the main differences you will see is that we’re no longer gathering mapped/allocated memory, and are instead gathering explicit/resident, which we are expecting to provide much more useful results. You don’t need to do anything to get the latest changes, just run the tests as described here (using the command line) or here (using Mozmill Crowd).
If you’re interested, here are the relevant bugs:
- Bug 633653 – Revamp about:memory
- Bug 657327 – Merge the “mapped” and “heap used” trees, and make the tree flatter
- Bug 656869 – No memory results on endurance testrun with Nightly 6.0a1
- Bug 657508 – Update dashboard to display endurance tests results from Firefox 6.0