The Amstrad CPC news portal
Jonathan Watt
Part of my work on WebKit at Igalia is keeping an eye on performance, especially when it concerns embedded devices. In my experience, there tend to be two types of changes that cause the biggest performance gains – either complete rewrites (e.g. WebRender for Firefox) or tiny, low-hanging fruit that get overlooked because the big picture is so multi-faceted and complex (e.g. making unnecessary buffer copies, removing an errant sleep(5) call). I would say that it’s actually the latter bug that’s harder to di
For a good while now, Alejandro García has been producing internal performance reports for WPE WebKit. A group of us will gather and do some basic testing of WPE WebKit on the same hardware – a Raspberry Pi 3B+. This involves running things like MotionMark and going to popular sites like YouTube and Google Maps and noting how well they work. We do this periodically and it’s a great help in tracking down regressions or obvious, user-facing issues. Another part of it is monitoring things like memory and CPU u
This patch couldn’t land as it was due to concerns with it subtly changing the behaviour of how requestAnimationFrame callbacks work, but the idea was sound and definitely pointed towards an area where there may be a relatively small change that could have a large effect. This laid the groundwork for us to dig deeper and debug what was really happening here. Being a fan of computer graphics and video games, frame delivery/cadence is quite a hot topic in that area. I had the idea that something was unusual,
The Amstrad CPC news portal
Jonathan Watt