Running a performance test

You can run perftest locally or in Mozilla’s CI

Running locally

Running a test is as simple as calling it using mach perftest in a mozilla-central source checkout:

$ ./mach perftest

The mach command will bootstrap the installation of all required tools for the framework to run, and display a selection screen to pick a test. Once the selection is done, the performance test will run locally.

If you know what test you want to run, you can use its path explicitly:

$ ./mach perftest perftest_script.js

mach perftest comes with numerous options, and the test script should provide decent defaults, so you don’t need to adjust them. If you need to tweak some options, you can use ./mach perftest –help to learn about them.

Running in the CI

Warning

If you are looking for how to run performance tests in CI and ended up here, you might want to check out Mach Try Perf.

Warning

If you plan to run tests often in the CI for Android, you should contact the Android infra team to make sure there’s availability in our pool of devices.

You can run in the CI directly from the mach perftest command by adding the –push-to-try option to your locally working perftest call.

This call will run the fuzzy selector and then send the job into our CI:

$ ./mach perftest --push-to-try

We have phones on bitbar that can run your android tests. Tests are fairly fast to run in the CI because they use sparse profiles. Depending on the availability of workers, once the task starts, it takes around 15 min to start the test.