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Firefox

Some quick hacks​

userContent & userChrome​

Make Browser Tab Bar More Compact​

  • about:config
  • browser.uidensity: 0 is the default, 1 is compact, 2 is touch (sparser)

Improving Firefox responsiveness on macOS - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog​

  • This improvement was achieved via a slight change in how locking is implemented within Firefox's memory allocator.
  • Putting a thread to sleep has significant performance implications and, thus, is not always the best option.
  • it might be advantageous to let a thread spin briefly if the lock it's trying to acquire is only held briefly.
  • It can result in higher performance and lower power consumption, as spinning costs less than sleeping.
  • As you might have guessed by now, OSSpinLock offered excellent performance on a lightly loaded system but behaved poorly as the load ramped up.
  • This problem with OSSpinLock was known within Apple hence its deprecation
  • Enter osunfairlock, Apple's official replacement for OSSpinLock. If you still use OSSpinLock, you'll get explicit warnings to use it instead
  • So I used it, but the results were terrible. Performance in some of our automated tests degraded by as much as 30%.
  • As it turns out, osunfairlock doesn't spin on contention; it makes the calling thread sleep right away when it finds a contended lock
  • The function is osunfairlockwithoptions() and the options I used are OSUNFAIRLOCKDATASYNCHRONIZATION and OSUNFAIRLOCKADAPTIVESPIN
  • The latter asks the kernel to use kernel-space adaptive spinning, and the former prevents it from spawning additional threads in the thread pools used by Apple's libraries
  • Did they work? Yes! Performance on lightly loaded systems was about the same as OSSpinLock, but on loaded ones, they provided massively better responsiveness
  • I initially fell back to OSSpinLock as an intermediate solution on older systems. Later I managed to get rid of it for good by relying on osunfairlock plus manual spinning in user space

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