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Firefox Faster In Wine Than Native
An anonymous reader writes "Tuxradar did some benchmarks comparing Firefox's Windows and Linux JavaScript performance. 'We did some simple JavaScript benchmarks of Firefox 3.0 using Windows and Linux to see how it performed across the platforms — and the results are pretty bleak for Linux.' Later on, they tried Wine. 'The end result: Firefox from Mozilla or from Fedora has almost nil speed difference, and Firefox running on Wine is faster than native Firefox.'"
I dual boot between Windows XP and Ubuntu GNU/Linux (of the Intrepid Ibex flavor).
Firefox is slow on Linux in general. Page Up, Page Down, Arrow Up, Arrow Down, Ctrl+Plus and Ctrl+Minus (to increase and decrease the font size)...all of these things are instantaneous on Windows XP, but there's a noticeable lag on Linux.
I'm not sure what the problem is. I'm using the proprietary ATI drivers on Linux, which should be pretty fast. And my machine is old enough that all the kinks should have been worked out of the Linux drivers for my hardware.
The idea is for the linker to identify the hot spots in memory, and group as many of them together as possible so they live on common pages. This helps keep those pages from being swapped out of memory to disk due to disuse, which greatly reduces the amount of thrashing your end users will see during normal use. Less thrashing == improved performance.
You were correct until here. This isn't PGO's primary purpose. It may do this to prevent TLB misses but, certainly not to lessen the impact of swapping (which for an average desktop linux user is almost non-existent). Optimization is about making decisions about what is likely to produce the fastest code. If the compiler knows how the code is going to be used, it can make better decisions.