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Friday, April 17, 2009

Profiling (timing) the firefox build process

Its been nearly 2 years since I am building Mozilla Firefox myself on my machines - various machines of varying capacity.

Initially it was a desktop having Intel Pentium 4, Single Core (obviously), 2.6Ghz, 256MB RAM, running Slackware 11. It probably used to take about 1.5 to 2 hours (I do not remember it now). I never profiled that at that time. Getting a mozilla build itself was a big achievement for me.

After that it was another desktop having Intel Core 2 Duo, Dual Core (obviously, again), 2.4 GHz, 2GB RAM, running Windows XP. This generally took about 45 minutes. AFAI Remember, I had several other programs running when firefox was building.

And this discussion of amount of time taken to build firefox came up a few times in IRC and I myself had this wish to time the build process. Off late, that is from about last week this wish became very strong and today finally I did time it, that too on two machines, my laptop and my desktop. This blog post is the result of the these two profiling tasks. Here are the results.

Note: By profiling I did not do any complicated or intricate. I just used the "time" utility which tells how much time the command takes.

1) On my laptop. --- Build was the only application running apart from the services.
Specs:
IBM Thinkpad T60p. (The one which heats up a lot)
Intel Centrino Duo, T2600 @ 2.16GHz, (Dual Core)
2GB RAM
Windows XP Pro SP2.

The results shown by the "time" utility are:

real 36m33.476s
user 4m17.776s
sys 4m36.271s

The build was done in the MingW shell that the mozilla build system provides. I am not sure to what extent these are reliable, but the real time is pretty much acceptable.

Edit:

Today I ran the build command from the history and hence the 'time" prefix got in automatically and the build was timed again. Surprisingly today's times are way away from the last one. Here are the times:

real 74m26.484s
user 9m53.015s
sys 8m18.365s

Well this time a lot of other apps were running. Firefox (2 instances), Chatzilla, Outlook, Several command windows, Komodo Edit (which again is like another firefox), notepad and a couple of explorer windows. So the time being doubled is not a surprise. Guess this just gives a perspective. :)

2) On my desktop --- Apart from the build process, FF with Chatzilla was running and several instances of bash (Terminals) were running.
Specs:
DELL Optiplex 755 (Sleak, powerful, sometimes fragile)
Intel Core 2 Quad, Q6600 @ 2.4Ghz
4GB RAM
Ubuntu, Gutsy Gibbon

And the results are:

real 20m40.497s
user 19m4.320s
sys 1m17.885s


The two sets of times are a little confusing. But real is all that matters as that is how long I have to wait for the build to be ready.

If you are planning a build then this info might help you plan things accordingly.

Happy building.


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