Understand Fenix developer needs

[mstange]

The Fenix team is interested in using the Firefox profiler more. However, as I understand it, they aren't necessarily interested in the Gecko data, they're mostly interested in using the UI, and using it to understand regressions in automation perf tests. The data sources would be Java/Kotlin stacks and manual marker instrumentation in the Java/Kotlin code.

We should find out what we can do to make their lives easier.

The following questions come to mind:

• What automated performance tests does Fenix use? Which test harnesses do these run in? Which of them support Gecko profiling already? Which of them can capture Android traces? Which of them do we want to get profiles from?
• What are examples of manual instrumentation / markers that the Fenix team is thinking about adding?
• How much Gecko data is needed? Do these profiles require having both Java/Kotlin markers and Gecko things on the same timeline? Or should we treat this as an entirely new data source?
• Apparently nimbledroid automatically generated some kind of profiling data. What type of profile did it generate (example profile?)? What needs to be done to generate similar data in our non-nimbledroid test harnesses?

[digitarald]

Cross-posted to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1616887#c1

[mstange]

This issue is quite outdated now. I don't think we've answered the questions above, but things have changed sufficiently in the meantime that you'd want to take a fresh look at this anyway. So I'm closing this issue.

[mstange]

Ah, we actually have answered most of those questions in the bug that Harald linked to.