The aim of the Mozilla project is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet. To keep innovating Mozilla faces some tough challenges of scale and performance.
How long does it take a page to load from my “Web 2.0” app and why is it taking longer today than yesterday?
Simple question, hard to answer. Was it changes in the core application that slowed things down, what part of the stack in my Web 2.0 app do I need to look at? How do I figure out if it’s my Java servlet code, AJAX/ Javascript causing the problem, the Firefox XUL code, the network latency, the underlying I/O performance, the interaction with the Xserver. Ohhhh my head is hurting already. All this on the client side of course, I’ll leave the performance tuning on the server side to the LAMP stack folks :)
What if we could put in a framework into Firefox and the underlying Gecko engine, that would let Mozilla developers who understand the higher level semantics of what it means to load a page, put in probes into the code to allow me to answer some of the above questions.
Well building on the shoulders of giants, that’s exactly what we have done :) Interested …..
