Thursday, August 27, 2015

38.2.1 delayed due to hardware failure

TenFourFox 38.2.1 was supposed to be released to you today but the hard disk used for compiling it blew up sometime yesterday and I've been recovering data from the drive and the last backup instead. The G5 version was built before the disk died, and does check out, but the other three builds haven't been yet. Let this be a reminder that DiskWarrior can fix a lot of things but not hardware failure (and people complaining of random faults in TenFourFox, please check your hardware first -- the symptom here was random freezes because the electronics kept dropping the drive off the SATA bus unexpectedly), so Data Rescue is busy getting the recoverable pieces off it and the rest I can restore from the file server. Both tools belong in your Power Mac bug-out bag and both still support PowerPC, so please support those vendors who still support us. It should be repaired enough to resume builds hopefully late tonight but I don't have an estimated time of release (hopefully no later than Sunday). It includes two Mozilla fixes and will also include a tweak for TenFourFox issue 306.

In the meantime, a fair bit of the wiki has been updated and rewritten for Github. I am also exploring an idea from bug 1160228 by disabling incremental garbage collection entirely. This was a bad idea on 31 where incremental GC was better than nothing, but now that we have generational garbage collection and the nursery is regularly swept, the residual tenured heap seems small enough to make periodic full GCs more efficient. On a tier 1 platform the overhead of lots of incremental cycles may well be below the noise floor, but on the pathological profile in the bug even a relatively modern system had a noticeable difference disabling incremental GC. On this G5 occasionally I get a pause in the browser for 20 seconds or so, but that happens very infrequently, and otherwise now that the browser doesn't have to schedule partial passes it seems much sprightlier and stays so longer. The iBook G4 saw an even greater benefit. Please note that this has not been tested well with multiple compartments or windows, so your mileage may vary, but with that said please see what you think: in about:config set javascript.options.mem.gc_incremental to false and restart the browser to flush everything out. If people generally find this superior, it may become the default in 38.3.

2 comments:

Due to an increased frequency of spam, comments are now subject to moderation.