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+# Performance Tests: DAMP
+
+DAMP (DevTools At Maximum Performance) is our test suite to track performance.
+
+## How to run it locally?
+
+```bash
+./mach talos-test --suite damp
+```
+Note that the first run is slower as it pulls a large tarball with various website copies.
+This will run all DAMP tests, you can filter by test name with:
+```bash
+./mach talos-test --suite damp --subtests console
+```
+This command will run all tests which contains "console" in their name.
+
+Note that in continuous integration, DAMP tests are split in smaller tests suites: `damp-inspector`, `damp-other` and `damp-webconsole`. Actually `--suite damp` is only used locally because it contains all possible tests and makes it easier to use. But if needed you can substitute `damp` with any of the other test suites if you want to only run tests associated to a given test suite. You can find the mapping between tests and test suites in [damp-tests.js](https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/testing/talos/talos/tests/devtools/addon/content/damp-tests.js).
+### Command line options
+
+#### Running tests only once
+
+```bash
+./mach talos-test --suite damp --cycles 1 --tppagecycles 1
+```
+`--cycles` will limit the number of Firefox restart to only one, while
+`--tppagecycles` will limit the number of test re-run in each firefox start to one.
+This is often helpful when debugging one particular subtest.
+
+#### Taking screenshots
+
+```bash
+DEBUG_DEVTOOLS_SCREENSHOTS=1 ./mach talos-test --suite damp
+```
+When passing `DEBUG_DEVTOOLS_SCREENSHOTS` env variable, screenshots will be taken after each subtest
+was run. The screenshot will be opened in new tabs and their title
+includes the subtest label. Firefox won't automatically close so that you can view the screenshots.
+
+#### Recording a profile
+
+```bash
+./mach talos-test --suite damp --gecko-profile --gecko-profile-entries 100000000
+```
+This will automatically record the tests and open the profile. You may use the following command in order
+to focus on just one subtest run:
+```bash
+./mach talos-test --suite damp --subtests custom.webconsole --cycles 1 --tppagecycles 1 --gecko-profile --gecko-profile-entries 100000000
+```
+
+## How to run it on try?
+
+```bash
+./mach try fuzzy --query "'test-linux1804-64-shippable-qr/ 'damp" --rebuild 6
+```
+* Linux appears to build and run quickly, and offers quite stable results over the other OSes.
+The vast majority of performance issues for DevTools are OS agnostic, so it doesn't really matter which one you run them on.
+* "damp" is the talos bucket in which we run DAMP.
+* And 6 is the number of times we run DAMP tests. That's to do averages between all the 6 runs and helps filtering out the noise.
+
+## How to get performance profiles on try?
+
+Once you have a successful try job for `damp`:
+* select this job in treeherder
+* click on the `...` menu in the bottom left
+* select "Create Gecko Profile"
+
+![PerfHerder Create Gecko Profile menu](perfherder-create-gecko-profile.png)
+
+This should start a new damp job called `damp-p`. Once `damp-p` is finished:
+* select the `damp-p` job
+* click on `Job Details` tab
+* click on `open in Firefox Profiler`
+
+## What does it do?
+
+DAMP measures three important operations:
+* Open a toolbox
+* Reload the web page
+* Close the toolbox
+It measures the time it takes to do each of these operations for the following panels:
+
+inspector, console, netmonitor debugger, memory, performance.
+
+It runs all these three tests two times. Each time against a different web page:
+* "simple": an empty webpage. This test highlights the performance of all tools against the simplest possible page.
+* "complicated": a copy of bild.de website. This is supposed to represent a typical website to debug via DevTools.
+
+Then, there are a couple of extra tests:
+* "cold": we run the three operations (open toolbox, page reload and close toolbox) first with the inspector.
+This is run first after Firefox's startup, before any other test.
+This test allows to measure a "cold startup". When a user first interacts with DevTools, many resources are loaded and cached,
+so that all next interactions will be significantly faster.
+* and many other smaller tests, focused on one particular feature or possible slowness for each panel.
+
+## How to see the results from try?
+
+First, open TreeHerder. A link is displayed in your console when executing `./mach try`.
+You should also receive a mail with a link to it.
+
+Look for "T-e10s(+6)", click on "+6", then click on "damp":
+![TreeHerder jobs](perfherder-damp.png)
+
+On the bottom panel that just opened, click on "Compare result against another revision".
+![TreeHerder panel](perfherder-compare-link.png)
+
+You are now on PerfHerder, click on "Compare",
+![PerfHerder compare](perfherder-compare.png)
+
+Next to "Talos" select menu, in the filter textbox, type "damp".
+Under "damp opt e10s" item, mouse over the "linux64" line, click on "subtests" link.
+![PerfHerder filter](perfherder-filter-subtests.png)
+
+And here you get the results for each DAMP test:
+![PerfHerder subtests](perfherder-subtests.png)
+
+On this page, you can filter by test name with the filter box on top of the result table.
+This table has the following columns:
+* Base:
+ Average time it took to run the test on the base build (by default, the last 2 days of DAMP runs on mozilla-central revisions)
+* New:
+ Average time it took to run the test on the new build, the one with your patches.
+ Both "Base" and "New" have a "± x.xx%" suffix which tells you the variance of the timings.
+ i.e. the average difference in percent between the median timing and both the slowest and the fastest.
+* Delta:
+ Difference in percent between the base and new runs.
+ The color of this can be red, orange or green:
+ * Red means "certainly regressing"
+ * Orange means "possibly regressing"
+ * Green means "certainly improving"
+ * No colored background means "nothing to conclude"
+ The difference between certainly and possibly is explained by the next column.
+* Confidence:
+ If there is a significant difference between the two runs, tells if the results is trustworthy.
+ * "low" either means there isn't a significant difference between the two runs, or the difference is smaller than the typical variance of the given test.
+ If the test is known to have an execution time varying by 2% between two runs of the same build, and you get a 1% difference between your base and new builds,
+ the confidence will be low. You really can't make any conclusion.
+ * "med" means medium confidence and the delta is around the size of the variance. It may highlight a regression, but it can still be justified by the test noise.
+ * "high" means that this is a high confidence difference. The delta is significantly higher than the typical test variance. A regression is most likely detected.
+
+There is also "Show only important changes" checkbox, which helps seeing if there is any significant regression.
+It will only display regressions and improvements with a medium or high confidence.
+
+## How to contribute to DAMP?
+
+DAMP is based on top of a more generic test suite called [Talos](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Buildbot/Talos).
+Talos is a Mozilla test suite to follow all Firefox components performance.
+It is written in Python and here are [the sources](https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/testing/talos/) in mozilla-central.
+Compared to the other test suites, it isn't run on the cloud, but on dedicated hardware.
+This is to ensure performance numbers are stable over time and between two runs.
+Talos runs various types of tests. More specifically, DAMP is a [Page loader test](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Buildbot/Talos/Tests#Page_Load_Tests).
+The [source code](http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/testing/talos/talos/tests/devtools/) for DAMP is also in mozilla-central.
+See [Writing new performance test](./writing-perf-tests.md) for more information about the implementation of DAMP tests.
+
+## How to see the performance trends?
+
+You can find the dedicated performance dashboard for DevTools at http://firefox-dev.tools/performance-dashboard. You will find links to trend charts for various tools:
+* [Inspector dashboard](http://firefox-dev.tools/performance-dashboard/tools/inspector.html?days=60&filterstddev=true)
+* [Console dashboard](http://firefox-dev.tools/performance-dashboard/tools/console.html?days=60&filterstddev=true)
+* [Netmonitor dashboard](http://firefox-dev.tools/performance-dashboard/tools/netmonitor.html?days=60&filterstddev=true)
+* [Debugger dashboard](http://firefox-dev.tools/performance-dashboard/tools/debugger.html?days=60&filterstddev=true)
+
+Each tool page displays charts for all the subtests relevant for a given panel.
+
+Each circle on the chart is a push to mozilla-central. You can hover on a circle to see some additional information about the push, such as the date, the performance impact for the subtest, and the push id. Clicking on a circle will take you to the pushlog.
+
+Colored circles indicate that the push contains a change that was identified as having a performance impact. Those can be categorized as:
+- hardware: hardware change for the machines used to run Talos
+- platform: non-DevTools change that impacts DevTools performance
+- damp: test change in DAMP that impacts test results
+- devtools: identified DevTools change that introduced an improvement or regression
+
+This data is synchronized from a [shared Google doc](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12Goo3vq-0X0_Ay-J6gfV56pUB8GC0Nl62I4p8G-UsEA/edit#gid=0).
+
+There is a PerfHerder link on each chart that will take you to the PerfHerder page corresponding to this subtest.
+
+## How to use PerfHerder charts
+
+On PerfHerder charts, each circle is a push on mozilla-central.
+When you see a spike or a drop, you can try to identify the patch that relates to it by clicking the circles.
+It will show a black popup. Then click on the changeset hash like "cb717386aec8" and you will get a mercurial changelog.
+Then it is up to you to read the changelog and see which changeset may have hit the performance.
+
+For example, open [this page](https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perf.html#/graphs?timerange=31536000&series=mozilla-central,1417969,1,1&series=mozilla-central,1417971,1,1&series=mozilla-central,1417966,1,1&highlightedRevisions=a06f92099a5d&zoom=1482734645161.3916,1483610598216.4773,594.756508587898,969.2883437938906).
+This is tracking inspector opening performance against the "Simple" page.
+![Perfherder graphs](regression-graph.png)
+
+See the regression on Dec 31th?
+Now, click on the first yellow circle of this spike.
+You will get a black popup like this one:
+![Perfherder changeset popup](regression-popup.png)
+
+Click on the [changelog link](https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=9104708cc3ac0ccfe4cf5d518e13736773c565d7&tochange=a06f92099a5d8edeb05e5971967fe8d6cd4c593c) to see which changesets were added during this run. Here, you will see that the regression comes from these patches:
+ * Bug 1245921 - Turn toolbox toolbar into a React component
+ * Bug 1245921 - Monkey patch ReactDOM event system for XUL