Stephen,
Thanks for doing these timings.
> Hardware: Dell Precision 220, 128 megs of RAM, Pentium III at 733 mhz.
> Network connection to test server (news.netscape.com) 345k/second.
For external people, news.netscape.com has about 38,000 newsgroups.
It would also be interesting to see how we perform on the target
machine. The target machine has much less RAM and a slower CPU. (I
can't remember off the top of my head how much RAM and how fast of a
CPU, but I can find out.) I suspect that on a machine with less RAM, OE
and NS 4.76 out perform Mozilla trunk build. Mozilla uses a lot of
memory, and as soon as you start swapping to disk, performance will go
down.
Getting some numbers for doing "refresh" over a modem would be
interesting, too. Over the modem, time spend downloading the list of
38,000 newsgroups will become a bigger factor.
> Outlook Express populated the list in 7 seconds.
> Netscape 6 populated the list in 5 seconds.
> Netscape 4.76 took 8 seconds.
Excellent! You mean "Mozilla Trunk" took 5 seconds, right? What we
shipped as Netscape 6 would have performed *very* poorly. Mozilla Trunk
vs. Netscape 6 would be an interesting measurement, too. I made all the
improvements to the subscribe dialog after we shipped.
Stephen, don't feel obligated to do more timings. (vs NS 6, on the
target machine, over a modem, etc.) I know you have other things to
work on. Subscribe performance is not a high priority issue.
-Seth
