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Firefox 3.5RC2 Performance In Windows Vs. Linux

Posted by timothy on Mon Jun 22, 2009 02:21 PM
from the tradeoffs-and-tradeoffs dept.
Mozilla The Internet
pizzutz writes "Andy Lawrence has posted a Javascript speed comparison for the recently released Firefox 3.5RC2 between Linux (Ubuntu 9.04) and Windows(XP SP3) using the SunSpider benchmark test. Firefox 3.5 will include the new Tracemonkey Javascript engine. The Windows build edges out Linux by just under 15%, though the Linux build is still twice as fast as the current 3.0.11 version which ships with Jaunty."
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Submission: Firefox 3.5RC2 Windows vs Linux Performance by pizzutz (1175903)
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Firefox 3.5RC2 Performance In Windows Vs. Linux 50 Comments More /

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  • Don't benchmark it on Ubuntu (Score:3, Interesting)

    by petrus4 (213815) on Monday June 22 2009, @02:23PM (#28426951) Homepage Journal

    Ubuntu typically has everything but the kitchen sink running in the background; it's even worse than XP for frivolous defaults.

    Get Slackware, or something else minimalistic, where you're likely to have a marginal amount of memory left after the operating system and residents are loaded in. ;)

  • maybe linux carries some of this blame (Score:5, Insightful)

    by asa (33102) <asa@mozilla.com> on Monday June 22 2009, @02:47PM (#28427471) Homepage
    Putting the blame all on Firefox when there's no doubt a certain amount of performance penalty that comes with a Linux's less good compiler is just lame. How about telling the linux tool makers to build tools that output faster and smaller code instead of demanding that app developers solve those problems? Finally, what "linux" build was this? Did it use profile guided optimization and other performance features of Mozilla's official Windows build system? If not, you're comparing apples to oranges.

      • Re:maybe linux carries some of this blame (Score:5, Informative)

        by loufoque (1400831) on Monday June 22 2009, @03:36PM (#28428343)

        This is a myth.
        I have barely ever noticed a performance increase when comparing code compiled with equivalent options on GCC, ICC and MSVC.

        Quite the contrary, GCC is faster more often than you'd think.

        • Why don't you compile Tracemonkey with MSVC, GCC, and ICC, then run the sunspider benchmark. Make sure you have PGO turned on for the MSVC build.

          Then you can go eat your hat.

        • GCC, ICC, MSVC (Score:5, Informative)

          by JambisJubilee (784493) on Monday June 22 2009, @05:41PM (#28430457)

          It is not a myth. ICC kicks the crap out of GCC. I didn't believe it until I had access to a computing cluster (Intel processors) with ICC installed. My ANSI C code runs about twice as fast using ICC than with GCC. Would you really expect anything different?

          As always, YMMV, but I suggest that anyone who doubts this to download Intel's compiler (it's free as in beer) and try it out.

          It's not open source, which does suck. But it does consistently produce faster code.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by asa (33102)
          Got links? I'd love to see some support for this. Until I get those, I'm going to take the large number of anecdotal accounts from the people who actually compile popular apps like Firefox on Windows and Linux as having a bit more weight than your lone voice without any supporting evidence or even specif anecdotes.

        • Re:maybe linux carries some of this blame (Score:5, Informative)

          by bsmedberg (955986) on Monday June 22 2009, @10:05PM (#28433901) Homepage
          Mozilla does comparative performance testing for the best GCC compiler flags constantly. There are several reasons why our Linux builds are slower than Windows:
          1. The Windows ABI is cheaper: every relocated symbol in Linux is resolved at runtime by loading the PIC register and going a GOT lookup. Windows avoids PIC code by loading the code at a "known" address and relocating it at startup only if it conflicts with another DLL.
          2. Mozilla code runs fastest when 99% of it is compiled for space savings, not "speed". Because of the sheer amount of code involved in a web browser, most of the code will be "cold". Tests have shown that at least on x86, processor caches perform much better if we compile 99% of our code optimizing for codesize and not raw execution time: this is very different than most compiler benchmarks. The MSVC profile-guided optimization system allows us to optimize that important 1% at very high optimization levels; the GCC profile-guided optimization system only really works within the confines of a particular optimization level such as -Os or -O3. In many cases using PGO with Linux produced much *worse* code!
          3. The GCC register allocator sucks, at least on register-starved x86: we've examined many cases where GCC does loads and saves that are entirely unnecessary, thus causing slowdowns.

          Believe me, we'd really love to make Linux perform as well as Windows! We spent a lot of time in Firefox 3 with libxul reducing startup time by making symbols hidden and reducing the number of runtime relocations...

  • Where's the proof that GCC is solely to blame? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pembo13 (770295) on Monday June 22 2009, @03:05PM (#28427819) Homepage

    I keep hearing people saying that it's all GCC's fault, but I have seen no real proof of that. Nor why a profit making company such as Mozilla can't throw devs at GCC to fix the underlying problem.

  • What about other common cross platform software ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by godrik (1287354) on Monday June 22 2009, @03:49PM (#28428597)
    Are there around some tests about other open source software that could help us understand the problem ? We can find some on open office : http://www.oooninja.com/2009/03/multiplatform-benchmark-30.html [oooninja.com] Or Tomcat : http://mediakey.dk/~cc/tomcat-performance-linux-faster-than-windows/ [mediakey.dk] But that does not seem to gie a clear understanding of what's happening.

    • Re:There! You have it! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2009, @02:33PM (#28427147)

      This proves that, um, Windows,er, Linux is....um...what the fuck does this prove again?

      And why the fuck should I care if there's a 15% difference in performance of Firefox between those two OSes? I use my particular OS for reason that have nothing to do with how well Firefox runs on it.

      That 15% could very well be measured in hours when the Slashtard coders get through with their Web 2.0 abominization of Slashdot.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Colonel Korn (1258968)

        This proves that, um, Windows,er, Linux is....um...what the fuck does this prove again?

        And why the fuck should I care if there's a 15% difference in performance of Firefox between those two OSes? I use my particular OS for reason that have nothing to do with how well Firefox runs on it.

        That 15% could very well be measured in hours when the Slashtard coders get through with their Web 2.0 abominization of Slashdot.

        People have been complaining or quite some time about poor performance on slashdot. What is it that shows this poor performance? I don't recall doing anything that isn't instantaneous here.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by jalefkowit (101585)
          The lag when posting a comment between hitting the "Preview" button and actually seeing the preview is downright painful.

    • Re:But why? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Freetardo Jones (1574733) on Monday June 22 2009, @02:38PM (#28427255)

      The Windows version is compiled with PGO (profile guided optimization) while Linux versions aren't.

    • Re:But why? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by moon3 (1530265) on Monday June 22 2009, @02:44PM (#28427407)
      The problem is that GCC is pretty much the only compiler on Linux used these days and while the code is very nice C++ compilers on Windows produce a bit better code still.

      But when I mention Watcom C++ or other aspiring open source compiler here, a compiler that could possibly interest Linux community and spawn some competition for GCC then I get modded down often by people citing GCC is good enough for everybody and everything.

      • Re:But why? (Score:5, Informative)

        by larry bagina (561269) on Monday June 22 2009, @02:50PM (#28427529) Journal
        also worth mentioning is llvm. gcc-llvm has an llvm backend doing code generation (which sometimes beats standard gcc, sometimes doesn't). There's also a non-gcc c/objective c/c++ compiler, clang, in development, though it may be a couple years before c++ support is complete.

      • Re:But why? (Score:5, Informative)

        by pz (113803) on Monday June 22 2009, @04:26PM (#28429257) Journal

        The problem is that GCC is pretty much the only compiler on Linux used these days and while the code is very nice C++ compilers on Windows produce a bit better code still.

        In my experience, MS's VC++ produces not just a bit better code than gcc, but whole hocking meeses better code. VC++ is a damned good compiler, no matter what one might think about the company that generated it, while gcc is a merely decent one, no matter how much one might want to promote FOSS.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by David Gerard (12369)
        The OpenWatcom license [openwatcom.org] is OSI-approved, but I don't see why. It failed DFSG, and I asked the FSF about it and they can't make head nor tail of it either.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Rockoon (1252108)
          Watcom isnt even top-3 anymore.

          The king of C compilers is now ICC, with both MSVC and GCC way behind.

    • Re:My problem with Firefox is this (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pablomme (1270790) on Monday June 22 2009, @02:44PM (#28427419)

      But on Linux, it is inherently ugly. The beast looks ancient and the fonts and dialogs make matters worse.

      Widgets and dialogs, ok, that's your aesthetic preference. But fonts? After a couple of years using Ubuntu I hate how Windows fonts look pixelated even with Cleartype on. Freetype is much better at its job than Cleartype. If only because of that, I prefer the looks of Firefox on linux than on Windows.

      • >>I hate how Windows fonts look pixelated even with Cleartype on

        There not pixelated, they have holes.

        http://www.ecofont.eu/ecofont_en.html [ecofont.eu]
        It's save electricity. See, MS is justing trying to be a "green" company.

      • The horrible fonts were what drove me away from Ubuntu after I installed it recently, hoping to use it as my primary desktop. I'm sure you've managed to fix up your fonts somehow, but let me tell you, a default ubuntu install (from the 8.x series, haven't tried more recent) produced such an eyeball searing ugliness in FireFox that it almost single handedly convinced me that Ubuntu wasn't ready yet (for me). The fact that a few searches with Google reveal hundreds of various ways to improve the fonts actu

    • >Ask Apple or even Windows folks.

      You have seen Safari, haven't you?

      It puts the 'f' in fugly.

    • Re:My problem with Firefox is this (Score:5, Informative)

      by jdgeorge (18767) on Monday June 22 2009, @02:52PM (#28427597)

      Firefox on Windows looks great/awesome/beautiful....name it. But on Linux, it is inherently ugly. The beast looks ancient and the fonts and dialogs make matters worse.

      Folks, I am not trolling so have a look for yourselves and compare....

      I'm running Windows XP and Ubuntu 9/04 side by side on similar laptops. Just to test, I looked at the main pages for Slashdot, Wikipedia (English), and Amazon, side-by-side.

      My eyeball result of looking for differences between pages rendered with Firefox on Ubuntu 9.04 vs Windows XP:

      • Slashdot (slashdot.org): indistinguishable
      • Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page): indistinguishable
      • Amazon (www.amazon.com): Bold fonts in the "Shop All Departments" navigation menu appear too big on Ubuntu; they don't quite seem to fit properly.

      Other than the issue for Amazon, the pages rendered look identical to me. The fonts for the menus look identical. I still disagree with the choice the mozilla team made to have the preferences/options menus with different titles in different locations for Linux versus Windows, but other than that, the UI seems consistent to me. The default GNOME theme for Firefox isn't as pretty as the new Firefox theme on Windows, but that's a minor aesthetic thing, and it's not ugly, it just isn't pretty.

    • Re:My problem with Firefox is this (Score:5, Informative)

      by TodLiebeck (633704) on Monday June 22 2009, @03:03PM (#28427781) Homepage

      Firefox on Windows looks great/awesome/beautiful....name it. But on Linux, it is inherently ugly. The beast looks ancient and the fonts and dialogs make matters worse.

      In Ubuntu 9.04 here, and I personally think the stock DejaVu fonts on Linux look quite nice. Actually prefer the traditional toolbar on Linux with Tango icons (tango.freedesktop.org) rather than the "enlarged back button" version found on Windows and OSX.

      The only problem I see is the topic of this thread, i.e., performance. It's slow enough to feel slow, and the fact that most Linux distros run so well on old hardware makes the problem worse.

      The bigger problem for the "Linux browsing experience" still seems to be Flash. Visiting a Flash-heavy site (like the horrible items produced by any given automaker) is a painful experience...it's bad enough that I'll typically crack open the MacBook. I find Flash sites consume an order of magnitude more CPU running natively in a Linux browser than they do running in a Windows XP VirtualBox instance hosted by the same Linux OS.

      AdBlockPlus and FlashBlock are the only things that enable me to continue to use this computer for web browsing. It's somewhat of a sad state of affairs, given that it's more than quick enough to run multiple VirtualBox instances, Eclipse instances, and a GIMP instance with dozens of files open at the same time. But give it one web page with a few Flash advertisements, and you'll think you're on a Pentium 60.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by FooBarWidget (556006)

            Unlikely to be X. I can play normal videos just fine at full speed. It's only Flash that eats CPU and is slow.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by asa (33102)
      Actually, it probably does say something about the superiority of the Windows compiler and potentially other Windows tools.

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