Tuning Add-on Performance: Windows Live Messenger Companion

Since we released IE9 Beta we’ve received lots of great feedback on the Add-on Performance Advisor. It’s encouraging to see how users are able to stay in control of their browsing performance in IE9. Ultimately, we want to enable users to use more of their add-ons without negatively impacting performance. To that end, we dedicated many of our recent posts to providing guidance to add-on developers on how to measure and improve add-on performance.

Our internal partners have focused on making performance optimizations to their add-ons based on the guidance we provided. A great case study is the Windows Live Messenger Companion add-on. You can learn more about their engineering efforts in the guest post below.

- Herman Ng

As we blogged here, Windows Live Messenger Companion is an add-on for Internet Explorer that ships with Windows Live Essentials beta.  Messenger Companion allows users to discover links that have been shared with them on their various social networks while they browse the internet.  Enabling the key scenarios for Messenger Companion requires the add-on to listen to various browser navigation events and run operations like network calls.  These operations can be expensive and affect the user’s browsing performance.

To present shared links to the user, Messenger Companion listens to the browser’s NavigateComplete2 event.  It then queries its servers for shared links that match the domain the user is currently visiting.  If a match is found, Messenger Companion presents a notification to users telling them about the new shared link.  If users click on the notification, Messenger Companion shows a rich preview of the shared links on the domain.

Some popular domains, like YouTube.com, can have an average of 40 or more shared links at any given time.  Displaying a large number of items can slow down the browser since rendering the list must occur on Internet Explorer’s UI thread.  To address this issue, Messenger Companion only loads and displays two or three shared links at a time.  When users page through the shared links, Messenger Companion updates its UI to show the next set of shared content.  This is an example of how an on-demand architecture can greatly decrease the performance hit that add-ons have on Internet Explorer.

The different events Messenger Companion listens to are BeforeNavigate2, NavigateComplete2, and DocumentComplete.  The following table describes the operations Messenger Companion completes at each event and the steps the Messenger Companion team took to minimize the add-on’s performance impact on Internet Explorer in terms of both load time and navigation time:

To minimize Messenger Companion’s impact on Internet Explorer’s startup and tab creation performance, the add-on uses a couple of strategies:

When measuring Internet Explorer add-on load or add-on shutdown times, great care is taken to produce trustworthy, repeatable and accurate results. In general, during performance improvement iterations, the Messenger Companion team took the following steps to arrive at their performance goals:

Include detailed instrumentation in and around key functions

• Calls to resource-intensive functions; functions that are called repeatedly; and functions writing to disk or performing network operations should be high-priority targets for measurement. Use a profiling tool to discover these functions and measure them accordingly – in many cases it was found that a single function call was responsible for 90% of the elapsed time of a user operation
• Treat function calls to external partner code as your own – the Messenger Companion team measured function calls to shared partner code and found performance issues that directly affected our product and others

Decrease variance in measured elapsed times

• Reduce “noise” in the measured results by eliminating all unnecessary background processes during a performance run, and by averaging many measurements of the same test. Run statistical analysis on the results to identify outliers and expected variance
• Use identical hardware configurations when comparing test results when possible. When gathering results from other customers, be sure to note their hardware, software and network configurations
• Maintain a history of previous build performance results to compare against current results. This will help developers identify whether an “outlier” run could be a legitimate performance regression if the values are well out of the scenario’s previous range

Produce actionable bug reports after measurements

• When possible, provide performance logs, profiler data, machine configuration and other relevant data when reporting a performance issue. Replace vague adjectives in descriptions with concrete data (e.g. “300ms to open a new tab” rather than “slow on new tabs”)

Here are Messenger Companion’s current performance details:

Being conscious of where your add-on completes expensive operations and investing in a performance measurement infrastructure can greatly decrease your add-on’s performance impact on Internet Explorer and improve users’ browsing experiences.  We hope that the information we’ve shared above will help you improve your add-on’s performance.  Do you have additional suggestions of ways to optimize add-on performance?  We’d love to hear them in the comments section below.

Windows Live Messenger Companion Team
Amanda Font, Program Manager
Hansel Ip, Software Engineer in Test
Wissam Kazan, Program Manager

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2010
  .hdp,.jxr(JPEG XR Filename extension)  Support! note : en.wikipedia.org/.../JPEG_XR

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2010
  JPEG XR is already supported, see the demo: ie.microsoft.com/.../ImageSupport

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2010
  I think I've seen a comment requesting JPEG XR support on every single post on this blog. You'd think people would notice it's supported by now?

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2010
  -_-^ IE9 :  .WDP(JPEG XR Filename extension) Support. but IE9 : .hdp,  .jxr(JPEG XR Filename extension)  - Not supported ok? and I can't speak English well

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2010
  Only 1 problem with Messenger Companion. IE9 hides the Command Bar by default, so this is not very usable. There must be some other way to access the Messenger Companion.

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2010
  When appears  Internet Explorer 9 RC ?

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2010
  When appears IE 9 RC ?

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2010
  Norton internet security suite 2011 Toolbar (Safe Web and Secure Logins), delays cold boot of ie 9 beta. 1 minute 4 seconds. Generally the cold boot of IE has degraded over the past two weeks. Even disabling all add-ons/currently loaded add-ons/and run with out permissions, Cold boot 15 sec - 44 secs. Have perfomed in safe mode with networking same isssue. Uninstalled ie 9 re installed no improvement Uninstalled Norton, cold boot for IE9 15 seconds, on subsequent cold bootups it varies from 15 secs to 44 seconds a lot better than 1 minute 4 seconds IE 8  4 seconds cold boot with Norton Toolbar enabled Firefox 3.6.4 cold boot 4 seconds with Norton Toolbar enabled side note: Once home page (google) (makes no difference if it is bing/yahoo or cnn) has populated from cold boot, the rest of the experience of ie is flawless opening/closing ie 9 is fast. So add-ons enabled or disabled degrades cold boot start up. . Win 7 pro 64 4gs of ram amd 965 phenomx4

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2010
  IE9 beta 64bit version ->   1185.5ms IE9 Platform Preview #6 ->    292ms Slow IE9 beta 64bit version  IE9 beta 64bit version

• Anonymous
  November 07, 2010
  Not sure what is going on your end..IE9 (any pp or beta) takes at most 2 sec to boot. usually it takes about 1 sec. I'm on a simple core2duo 3gig machine.

• Anonymous
  November 07, 2010
  Hey IE team, do you realize what's the greatest usability flaw of the new IE9 notification bar? That you just can't ignore it (like you could ignore the Information Bar) and it requires the user to close it (again something the Information bar didn't require). If multiple notifications are shown, they pile up and without closing the first notification the 2nd one doesn't show. Why did people hate the dialog that appeared in Vista when you safely removed a USB device? Because users had to click OK on it for it to go away. Whereas in XP or W7, you can simply ignore the balloon notification which appears when a USB device is safely removed. The same problem is with the notification bar. Not only does it cover a certain part of the page but it doesn't go away or can be ignored. IE9 is a step back in usability in every way but with a great rendering engine. What's the point of this great rendering engine if the usability is so horrible?

• Anonymous
  November 07, 2010
  The notification bar is often returning asking for Add on performance. How can I stop it doing that. I am happy with the current set of addons being present. I do not need the often repeated notification about add on performance anymore

• Anonymous
  November 08, 2010
  Measuring memory consumption for each operation is important.  Our several hundred 2gb and 1gb ram corporate desktops slow down greatly if IE8 has 3 tabs open due to memory consumption.

• Anonymous
  November 09, 2010
  Maybe you can take the hint when a long winded post about Windows Live only generates one response actually about Windows Live.....

• Anonymous
  November 10, 2010
  good