Aside from some pangs of nostalgia, it is with great pleasure that I announce the retirement of areweslimyet.com, the areweslimyet github project, and its associated infrastructure (a sad computer in Mountain View under dvander’s desk and a possibly less sad computer running the website that’s owned by the former maintainer).
Wait, what?
Don’t worry! Are we slim yet, aka AWSY, lives on, it’s just moved in-tree and is run within Mozilla’s automated testing infrastructure.
For equivalent graphs check out:
– Explicit
– RSS
– Miscellaneous
You can build your own graph from Perfherder. Just choose ‘+ Add test data’, ‘awsy’ for the framework and the tests and platforms you care about.
Wait, why?
I spent a few years maintaining and updating AWSY and some folks spent a fair amount of time before me. It was an ad hoc system that had bits and pieces bolted on over time. I brought it into the modern age from using the mozmill framework over to marionette, added support for e10s, and cleaned up some old slightly busted code. I tried to reuse packages developed by Mozilla to make things a bit easier (mozdownload and friends).
This was all pretty good, but things kept breaking. We weren’t in-tree, so breaking changes to marionette, mozdownload, etc would cause failures for us and it would take a while to figure out what happened. Sometimes the hard drive filled up. Sometimes the status file would get corrupted due to a poorly timed shutdown. It just had a lot of maintenance for a project with nobody dedicated to it.
The final straw was the retirement of archive.mozilla.org for what we call tinderbox builds, builds that are done more or less per push. This completely broke AWSY back in January and we decided it was just better to give in and go in-tree.
So is this a good thing?
It is a great thing. We’ve gone from 18,000 lines of code to 1,000 lines of code. That is not a typo. We now run on linux64, win32, and win64. Mac is coming soon. We turned on e10s. We have results on mozilla-inbound, autoland, try, mozilla-central, and mozilla-beta. We’re going to have automated crash analysis soon. We were able to use the project to give the greenlight for the e10s-multi project on memory usage.
Oh and guess what? Developers can run AWSY locally via mach. That’s right, try this out:
mach awsy-test --quick
Big thanks go out to Paul Yang and Bob Clary who pulled all this together — all I did was do a quick draft of an awsy-lite implementation — they did the heavy lifting getting it in tree, integrated with task cluster, and integrated with mach.
What’s next?
Now that we’re in-tree we can easily add new tests. Imagine getting data points for running the AWSY test with a specific add-on enabled to see if it regresses memory across revisions. And anyone can do this, no crazy local setup. Just mach awsy-test.
Great news! I will keep this new command in mind. And thank you a lot for all the reports and help with mozdownload in the past! Lets see how the new system evolves. Having it in tree is definitely a huge improvement.
Speaking of perfherder, here’s hoping this might draw in some people who are attached enough to areweslimyet’s level of intuitiveness to contribute.
I never really had much practical use for these sorts of analyses on Firefox’s codebase beyond idle curiosity, but, if the RSS graph you linked is any indication, areweslimyet was better than perfherder at presenting a readable graph.
(eg. perferherder’s Y-axis units are unlabelled and not formatted appropriately for easy reading and a graph that noisy could stand for some trend lines.)