> I've started a wiki-page to track status of some micro-
> benchmarks I have been working on for the cache. The page
> is located here
>
>   https://wiki.mozilla.org/Necko/MobileCache/MicroBenchmarks

It's great to have xpcshell running on android (I spent ages getting
e10s xpcshell to work--I feel your pain :)  But I don't think that
writing more xpcshell microbenchmarks is going to be the best way
going forward.  There's just so many variables (varying browsing
history, OS disk I/O caching, etc) that it gets very difficult to do
anything approaching a realistic test.   If at some point we can write
a system that turns a browsing session into a series of URIs for
xpcshell to repeat (AND the browsing history is both representative
AND larger than the working size of the cache--which is huge for
desktop), that would be great.  But it still won't capture all the
characteristics out there (like disk vs network speeds for our user
base vs on our test machines, etc.).  And as we start to migrate to
web apps, etc. the cache access pattern will probably change
dramatically anyway.

I think the best way forward for now is telemetry.  We need to add
telemetry hooks anyway in order to get fine-grained data on which
parts of the cache logic are taking the longest.  If the telemetry
data we have for now is only from a few dozen developers working on
mobile and some handful of volunteers, I'm actually fine with that.
It still seems better than trying to chase down a realistic synthetic
benchmark, and as fennec's user base grows the telemetry data will get
better.   I'm even fine (for now) with testing cache patches on one
developer's device, and if they look promising, landing them on
nightly to see if nightly telemetry users see the same improvements.
I don't see how much better we can do for now (down the road we could
aim for A|B testing of course).  I don't want building logically
better infrastructure getting in the way of us moving forward with
figuring out and fixing the disk cache for mobile.

I'm open to differing opinions.  Thoughts?
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