[HTTPS-Everywhere] Startup time measurements in Chrome and Firefox

[Mike Perry]

For what it's worth, I did a quick test converting the XML rulesets to
JSON. Parsing the resulting JSON string took 0.06 seconds, were as on my
machine parsing the XML rulesets took 1.61 seconds.

It seems this means we want to convert the XML to JSON during build
time, whichever way we go with actual manipulation of the ruleset data
strings and data structures inside the browser.

I still believe it is easier for humans to actually write rules in XML
rather than JSON, though.

Peter Eckersley:
> Particularly in the master branch (ie, Firefox HTTPSE version 4.x), the
> 10,000 rulesets that we need to parse in from XML are starting to add
> problematic amounts of latency to browser load time.  Unfortunately we
> can't postpone this work until after the browser has started because we
> don't know whether a ruleset is going to be needed immediately to
> prevent an insecure outbound HTTP request.
> 
> Measured ruleset parsing times on a modern-ish laptop (you can get them in
> firefox with the about:config loglevel set to 4 or less, I just added
> them to chrome):
> 
> Firefox, master branch:
> 
> Loading rulesets took 3.903 seconds
> 
> Firefox, stable branch:
> 
> Loading rulesets took 1.168 seconds
> 
> Chrome, master branch (unreleased):
> 
> Loading rulesets took 1.755 seconds
> 
> Chrome, stable branch:
> 
> Loading rulesets took 0.582 seconds
> 
> It's suspicious to me that the parser is almost exactly twice as fast in
> Chrome as it is in Firefox.  But either way, Mike and I are hacking
> today on a way to fix these problematic slowdowns at browser load time.
> 
> -- 
> Peter Eckersley                            pde at eff.org
> Technology Projects Director      Tel  +1 415 436 9333 x131
> Electronic Frontier Foundation    Fax  +1 415 436 9993
> _______________________________________________
> HTTPS-Everywhere mailing list
> HTTPS-Everywhere at lists.eff.org
> https://lists.eff.org/mailman/listinfo/https-everywhere

-- 
Mike Perry
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