Pale Moon 64bit vs Waterfox benched on AMD A6 (Dual & Quad)

[Ryrynz]

Back before Paler Moon 15 was released there was some curiosity regarding performance of Pale Moon vs Waterfox, especially on AMD hardware.
Seeing as both would be on Gecko 15 code the 64bit version of Pale Moon could be directly compared to Waterfox.

Here are some results of my benching on a couple of AMD A6 processors and an Intel Ivybridge i7, Waterfox is shown as the reference performance. All benches were done at least twice and averaged with large differences thrown out completely.





The results makes me wonder if using the Intel compiler is a better option across both AMD and Intel processors (provided that's all that's changed in Waterfox) or if MSVC 2012 adds anything to the table.

Peacekeeper shows the largest performance difference, with Pale Moon cleaning up with Mozilla's Kraken.

I wouldn't mind trying out some Turions and Semprons as well but I don't have any to test. My feeling is the latest generation matters more than the older ones anyway and the results would likely mirror what I'm seeing here.

[stravinsky]

1.AFAIK, MSVC compiler have not been updated in a while. It cant compare with GCC much.
2. The difference in these benches could also mean WF is using these benchies for its PGO. I dont think switching to ICC would make that much of a difference.
3. ICC costs money. It aint free.
4. I dont know how much broken cross-compiling PM still is. But i would like to see some GCC builds too.

[Moonchild]

ad 1. I'd like to update Visual Studio to 2012 since it has some improvements in the compiler (possibly why Mozilla Firefox builds push ahead a little in some benchmarks right now, despite using less optimized settings); unfortunately, VS11 is not within my budget at the moment.
ad 3. MSVC isn't free either
ad 4. Cross-compiling for platforms is horribly broken. GCC builds also really can't compare to MSVC builds, from what I have seen, GCC is a decent compiler, but not great, especially not for Windows.

[stravinsky]

Does a PM/FF build support link time optimization ?
I was reasing some stuff on phoronix, and the general agreement was that LTO builds are smaller, and perform about the same as an -O2 build, but at the expense of more than double the RAM usage and time during compilation.

[Moonchild]

Does a PM/FF build support link time optimization ?
I was reasing some stuff on phoronix, and the general agreement was that LTO builds are smaller, and perform about the same as an -O2 build, but at the expense of more than double the RAM usage and time during compilation.

This has been used since day one. WPO (Whole Program Optimization) is a basic method that does LTCG (Link-Time Code Generation) which is what you are talking about. Yes, the build process is very taxing on the workstation it's built on. This is why I had to get myself a modern PC; the "black box" build PC simply didn't suffice anymore as I ran out of address space and builds started taking upwards of 4 hours.
Pale Moon is built with -O2 (MSVC definition) as well as WPO, and WPO is implied in any PGO build (since you can't do PGO on a "straight up" build).

[Ryrynz]

MC, any expectations of having VS2012 when 17 lands or sooner?

[Moonchild]

MC, any expectations of having VS2012 when 17 lands or sooner?

Not likely, unless someone can donate a VS2012 Professional license to me. I just don't have a grand $500 to blow on this upgrade, and I'm no longer in the position where I can get a license from my workplace. The free "Express" version is too crippled (doesn't allow PGO) to be usable for Pale Moon (in addition there not being a version available (only "planned") to create desktop applications - they only have a windows 8 native version that can only create windows 8 Metro "Modern UI" apps).

[stravinsky]

windows 8 Metro "Modern UI"

flat UI

[Moonchild]

Is it even a UI? Can you call a flat square with text in it a UI?

[satrow]

UI means User Interference now?