[Cosmo-dev] Cosmo UI perf profiling

[Heikki Toivonen]

Matthew Eernisse wrote:
> After some chatter in IRC this morning, and a message to the list from
> BCM about using the Web UI, I decided to do some Cosmo perf profiling
> with Firebug. This data is obviously not comprehensive or definitive --

You might want to consider standardizing on seconds as the measure of
time (rather than milliseconds). From the users point of view a
difference of a few milliseconds won't make a difference, and the
natural variation is so big that you can't really claim millisecond
accuracy either.

In Chandler all performance times are reported at most to one hundredth
of a second (when reporting official numbers I used to report with three
significant numbers and scientific rounding but haven't done that in a
while).

Also, you should come up with use cases you really want to monitor, and
might want to set ideal targets for those as well as acceptable targets
for each release. The ideal values will probably fit into the three
buckets: <0.1 feels instantaneous, <1 won't disrupt users flow of
thought and 10 seconds is the maximum time to hold user hostage to a
synchronous dialog or some such. These numbers come from usability
research described at http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html and
we use them for Chandler as well. You might want to compare the action
times to the competition as well when thinking about the acceptable
times, like we did in same cases with Chandler
(http://wiki.osafoundation.org/Journal/AnthonyFrancoPerformanceTesting).

We run the Chandler performance tests continuously; you can see the
reports from the Tinderbox page:
http://builds.osafoundation.org/tinderbox/Chandler/status.html

-- 
  Heikki Toivonen


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