Running the ‘Mem Buster’ endurance test

Dave Hunt

I blogged a few weeks ago about how I was able to demonstrate improvements to the memory usage of Firefox using endurance tests. The test I was using was inspired by Stuart Parmenter’s Mem Buster test, and it has now been checked into the repository and available for anyone to run.

At the moment it’s only possible to run the Mem Buster test from the command line (hopefully Mozmill Crowd support won’t be too far off). The first thing you’ll need is the mozmill-automation repository checked out. If you already have this then you’ll need to do a pull and update to make sure you have the latest changes.

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/qa/mozmill-automation

Then, from the mozmill-automation directory, run the following command:

./testrun_endurance.py --reserved=membuster --delay=3 --iterations=2 --entities=100 --report=http://mozmill-crowd.brasstacks.mozilla.com/db/ /Applications/Firefox.app

The reserved argument test the script to only run the Mem Buster test and not the general endurance tests. The test opens a site for each entity, so by specifying 100 entities and 2 iterations it will open a total of 200 sites. The delay of 3 seconds is from the original Mem Buster test. I would recommend including the report argument as this shares your results and allows you to see the visualisation of memory usage during the test. The final argument is the location of the version of Firefox you want to run the tests against.

Below is a screencast demonstrating the Mem Buster endurance test on Windows 7:

If you’re interested in following the progress of the endurance tests project, check out the project page. For further help you can find the documentation here, post a comment to this entry, or ask a question in the QMO forums.