You are currently viewing a snapshot of www.mozilla.org taken on April 21, 2008. Most of this content is highly out of date (some pages haven't been updated since the project began in 1998) and exists for historical purposes only. If there are any pages on this archive site that you think should be added back to www.mozilla.org, please file a bug.

Skip to main content

Effect of sidebar on navigator performance

Browser startup time4 Page load time5
Linux6 With sidebar1 2466 millis 110% 811 millis 136%
Sidebar hidden2 2328 millis 104% 619 millis 104%
Without sidebar3 2234 millis 100% 593 millis 100%
 
Windows6 With sidebar 2125 millis 110 % 550 millis 135%
Sidebar hidden 2087 millis 108 % 425 millis 105%
Without sidebar 1932 millis 100% 405 millis 100%
 
Mac6 With sidebar --- millis --- % 1891 millis 130%
Sidebar hidden --- millis --- % 1532 millis 105%
Without sidebar --- millis 100% 1455 millis 100%

1. With sidebar

  • The nsSidebar component was loaded
  • The sidebar content was loaded, i.e., sidebarOverlay.{xul,js,css}
  • The sidebar was open and expanded by default

2. Sidebar hidden

  • The sidebar was hidden by default using F9 and restarting the browser

3. Without sidebar

  • The nsSidebar component was not loaded
  • The sidebar content was not loaded, i.e., sidebarOverlay.{xul,js,css}
  • The sidebarOverlay.xul reference was removed from navigator.xul

4. Browser startup time
Browser startup time was measured by capturing the start timestamp in a launching C program, passing it in the command line URL argument to the page first opened, and then the opened page computing the delta by recording the end timestamp in the page's onload handler.

5. Page load time (perceived window open time)
Page load time was measured by taking the delta between load end and start time. Load start time was the timestamp taken just before calling window.open(). Load end time was the timestamp taken when the page onload handler was called. This measurement was taken a 100 times and averaged for each condition on each platform. The launching page sends the start timestamp to the worker child that computes the delta and passes it on till the number of windows meets the threshold as set in the original launching page.

6. Configuration information
Operating system Hardware model Processor Memory
Linux RedHat Linux 7.1 Kernel 2.4.2-2 HP Vectra VL 800 Intel Pentium 4 1.5 GHz 512MB
Windows Microsoft Windows 2000 5.00.2195 Service Pack 1 HP Vectra VL 800 Intel Pentium 4 1.5 GHz 512MB
Mac Mac OS 8.6 PowerMac G3 PowerPC G3 400 MHz 256 MB
Current mozilla optimized builds (2001-11-01) were used for all platforms.

Samir Gehani <sgehani@netscape.com>