Firebug Performance By The Numbers
One of the goals we had recently was to get some idea of the performance characteristics of Firebug in its various operating states within Firefox. I spent some time a couple of weeks ago running some performance tests in Dromaeo and Talos and came up with some interesting numbers and graphs. Rather than rehash the entire thing here, I’ll link to the relevant analysis docs here for perusal: Dromaeo results, Talos results.
What became pretty clear was that there was only a very negligible performance hit for having Firebug installed. Better yet, it’s quite performant even with the Firebug console enabled, meaning you can keep Firebug on your default profile without worrying about impacting your regular browsing.
Memory performance was similar and even with the script debugger enabled, memory usage peaked and levelled off indicating that there were no real leaks visible, even though pages took noticeably longer to load.
This isn’t to say that we’re sitting idly on our hands congratulating everyone on a job well-done. John Barton noticed a particular JavaScript test that was noticeably slower than it’s neighbors and it jogged his memory about some testing he’d done earlier in the 1.2 development cycle. This should translate into improved eval script performance in 1.3 and future versions of Firebug.
I’m looking forward to revisiting these benchmarks down the line to track our improvements.
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