PGO Related Bugs

Project Name

PGO Related Bugs

Project Description

Firefox crashes or experiences bugs after creating PGO builds on Windows. The focus of this project is to determine what is causing these crashes or bugs and either patch/fix them or find solutions to allow for the optimizations without incurring the problems.

Project Leader(s)

Chris Bishop

Project Contributor(s)

- None so far but that will change.

NOTE: only Project Leader(s) should add names here. You can’t add your own name to the Contributor list.

Project Tasks

Task	Details	Priority	Status	Target	Link(s)
Compile Firefox PGO	Compile the trunk of Firefox using make -f client.mk profiledbuild.	High	Done	0.1 R
Reproduce PGO Bugs or Crashes	I need to reproduce the bugs or crashes other people were experiencing with their pgo builds.	High	Not Started	0.1 R
Compile Firefox PGO Tests	Compile Firefox with VS 2005 and Vista SDK and compile with VS 2008 w/o Vista SDK.	low	Not Started	0.3 R

Project Details

Details to come...

Project News

September 2008

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• Sept 26th, 2008 - Compile with VS 2005 Instead
  • mconner and dbaron on the #developers on irc://moznet.org suggested I try to compile the profile build using Visual Studio 2005. My other build environment is XP (32bit), VS 2008 and Vista SDK. For testing purposes I should check if VS 2005 and Vista SDK compile then VS 2008 by itself. I'll probably use VirtualBox to make it easier. The actual error to my compiling with VS 2008 is found under Project Details.
    
    




• Sept 24, 2008 - PGO build with no debug or tests
  • I Compiled Firefox with disable debug and tests and I did not receive any assertions but the build still failed to compile.  :(
    
    
• Sept 22th, 2008 - Firefox and PGO
  • I built Firefox with the command make -f client.mk profiledbuild. This first compiles Firefox with extra code that watches the activity in Firefox and creates profile data to optimize Firefox. After Firefox is compiled it runs a script that loads the browser. While the browser it is outputting profile data about the activity. After the browser is closed it compiles again but this time using the profile data to optimize Firefox to run faster on Windows.
    
    During the compiling of Firefox I received a lot of warnings. Then Minefield loaded and after typing in an URL an Assertion happened. Firefox closed and continue to compile using the profile data but it failed with errors. I tried again this time just closing the browser after it started but again it failed to compile with the profile data.
    
    I'll post the output and error logs online. Here are some of the errors.

    make[6]: *** [mozlcms.dll] Error 232
    make[6]: *** Deleting file `mozlcms.dll'
    make[5]: *** [libs] Error 2
    make[4]: *** [libs_tier_external] Error 2
    make[3]: *** [tier_external] Error 2
    make[2]: *** [default] Error 2
    make[1]: *** [build] Error 2
    make: *** [profiledbuild] Error 2
    

    Here is link to build output.
    
    

• Sept 20th, 2008 - Compiled an old assignment with PGO
  • My previous attempts at compiling the old assignment failed because I was including object files that were compiled with a different compiler. Oops. I was successful at creating a PGO build with an old assignment.
    The program loads 15,000 random records from a text file into 4 tables each using a different method for storage and searching.
    1. Simple Table: Uses an array and a linear search.
    2. Chain Table: Uses an array of link lists. Search is done with a Hash Key.
    3. Hash Table: Uses an array and searches with linear probing. Also uses a Hash Key.
    4. Tree Table: Uses a binary search tree.

    
    After the data is loaded into a table, 30 different tests are run against it. The same 30 tests for each table. Here are the Results.

    	Non-PGO	PGO	Improved By
    Simple Table:	28 Secs	4 Secs	7x
    Chain Table:	0.109 Secs	0.047 Secs	2.3x
    Hash Table:	0.141 Secs	0.047 Secs	2.3x
    Tree Table:	0.287 Secs	0.078 Secs	3.6x

    
    I think I will look at the optimization data to figure out how it optimized my application. I also need to build an optimized version of Firefox and run it. I know it has bugs or crashes, that is the point of this project so I also need to figure out how to compile and debug Firefox in Visual Studio.
    
    

• Sept 19th, 2008 - Working with PGO
  • Working with some old assignments in c and c++ I tried to compile these programs with pgo options but the linker failed on both projects. Also tried from inside of Visual Studio 2008 but received compilation errors.
    
    
• Sept 18th, 2008 - Created Project Page
  • I created this page for the project and added it to the list of Projects.
    
    
• Sept 17th, 2008 - Created First Build
  • I walked through the Mozilla documentation for how to build Firefox. I started here with getting the source code and continued until I received errors. Humph and Ted on IRC helped me sort it out and I successfully built Firefox.
    
    
• Sept 15th, 2008 - Met with Ted Mielczarek
  • On Tuesday after the conference was over I met with Ted and we discussed how I can get started on the PGO Project.