Some More Very Satisfying Graphs

I guess I just really like graphs that step downwards:

Earlier this week :mreid noticed that our Nightly population suddenly started sending us, on average, 150 fewer kilobytes (uncompressed) of data per ping. And they started doing this in the middle of the previous week.

Step 1 was to panic that we were missing information. However, no one had complained yet and we can usually count on things that break to break loudly, so we cautiously-optimistically put our panic away.

Step 2 was to see if the number of pings changed. It could be we were being flooded with twice as many pings at half the size, for the same volume. This was not the case:

Step 3 was to do some code archaeology to try and determine the “culprit” change that was checked into Firefox and resulted in us sending so much less data. We quickly hit upon the removal of BrowserUITelemetry and that was that.

…except… when I went to thank :Standard8 for removing BrowserUITelemetry and saving us and our users so much bandwidth, he was confused. To the best of his knowledge, BrowserUITelemetry was already not being sent. And then I remembered that, indeed, back in March :janerik had been responsible for stopping many things like BrowserUITelemetry from being sent (since they were unmaintained and unused).

So I fired up an analysis notebook and started poking to see if I could find out what parts of the payload had suddenly decreased in size. Eventually, I generated a plot that showed quite clearly that it was the keyedHistograms section that had decreased so radically.

Around the same time :janerik found the culprit in the list of changes that went into the build: we are no longer sending a couple of incredibly-verbose keyed histograms because their information is now much more readily available in profiles.

The power of cleaning up old code: removing 150kb from the average “main” ping sent multiple times per day by each and every Firefox Nightly user.

Very satisfying.

:chutten