Firefox plugin CPU usage

Question

I need to collect data on firefox CPU usage during web-development coding session and I'm wondering if it is possible to monitor CPU usage of particular firefox plugin.

Right now i'm using windows' perfmon.msc, but it will only allow me to monitor firefox process as a whole.

Do you know any tools that would allow me to get CPU data from a plugin? Is it possible at all ?

Answer 1

You could analyze the CPU usage using Process Explorer. Right-click on the Firefox process and select properties. On the Threads tab you will see the different threads including add-ins such as Flash or Acrobat with their CPU usage listed.

EDIT: In fact, it should be possible to monitor threads with perfmon, too: Right-click to select Add Counters... and then choose Threads as performance object.

Answer 2

I'd guess your best option would be to test your plugin in a seperate Firefox process, but you're probably doing that anyway.

For real profiling you should use Firebug. I'm not sure about it, but I think it is possible to run XUL apps inside of Firefox (without integrating it as a plugin). If this is not an option then you could maybe separate out code that you suspect to be slow into a web page and profile it with Firebug. This would of course only work for stuff that is not interacting with the Mozilla core.

Answer 3

There are some JS profilers which also profile extension JS, however they don't really help on finding problematic addons.

There was a feature on the concept design of Firefox 4, however it's dumped as FX4 is feature-frozen now. But I'm still after that feature and wish to follow any progress in that direction.

Here is a question to find more about it; https://superuser.com/q/218733/46962

For CPU utilization, you can collect the data using MS Perfmon, which is a part of Windows, and also used for similar purposes, like collecting CPU performance & stats data on SQL server for optimization.