It is the second time I’m at foss.in and this time I was talking about the current work I’m doing on QtWebKit. Nokia is kind enough to give me enough time to explore the performance of QtWebKit (mostly on Qt Embedded Linux and ARM) and do fixes across the stack in WebKit, Qt or whereever we think it will be necessary.

Performance for me comes in memory footprint and runtime speed (how long does it take?) and for this I have experimented using OProfile, Memprof/Memusage, QBENCHMARK but also wrote some WebKit specific tools. E.g. a tool that allows me to mirror webpages to turn them into a benchmark (which still has quite some problems), a simple http server to serve the content, some test case reductions in order to look into specific areas like networking, image decoding, painting, fonts.

The slides and links can be found here and they link back to the WebKIt wiki where you can find an introduction to the (Qt)WebKit specific tools, a set of bugs and pending patches, and a set of issues that are known but not yet handled.

The main message of the talk is to not do optimisation by myth, but to use a stable environment and one of the existing tools to see what is going. It is really easy.