Question

I currently analyse inefficient Firefox addons by uninstalling them and seeing empirically in a long run whether the addon was a problem or not. However, this way of finding the inefficient addons is very time-consuming.

I would like to know exact numerical ways to see

  1. the CPU consumption for each addon independently in Firefox
  2. the CPU consumption for two different addons at the same time in Firefox (note that it is not practical to have two addons in your browser at each time and then measure the need in a long term)

It is apparently enough to measure only CPU, not memory consumption at all, to keep tests simple.

Is there any tool to measure CPU consumption for the combination of 2 in a set of addons?

Was it helpful?

Solution

No, unfortunately there is no such tool. The closest thing are various profiling tools (like Venkman), which can show you time spent in various JS functions, but aggregating that data to determine if an extension is inefficient will be tricky.

Mozilla also uses dtrace on Mac (with special builds of Firefox and special dtrace scripts) to analyze performance. I imagine it could be adapted for this too.

OTHER TIPS

There is a Firefox add-on to see the memory usage: about addons memory.

Install the addon and open the page about:addons-memory, it will display the memory usage for all installed addon (including Firefox native addons).

You might also be interested by tab memory usage, which display memory usage for each opened tab.

Licensed under: CC-BY-SA with attribution
Not affiliated with StackOverflow
scroll top