Leaving Auckland

We are moving again; back to Christchurch. Hopefully this time to fewer earthquakes and more normalcy. I will continue my tradition of writing a retrospective on my year in a new city, this time Auckland.

I have been pretty much disappointed by Auckland. I had high hopes, I was hoping for big city culture, fun nights out, interesting cafes, and a bit more life than was offered by post-quake Christchurch. Partially because of my own laziness, and partially because of the city, that did not happen.

First the good bits: the Project is the awesome-est little climbing wall in the world. The wall is a good size and has good angles, and the setting has been great. But really, the community of climbers there has been amazing. I have met and hung out with a lot of very, very good people and had a lot of fun climbing and hanging out. I am going to really miss that place. In fact, (and contrary to popular opinion) I found the people of Auckland to be a real upside. My experience has been that they have been a lot more open-minded and less cliquey than people elsewhere in NZ, whilst still being friendly and laid back. I think the Project is mostly to blame for this opinion, and my sample size is small.

The second great thing about Auckland is the Mozilla office. I know it's kind of sad for work to be a highlight, but it has been fantastic. The physical office is pretty good - well-equipped, good atmosphere, everything needed for productivity and comfort. The thing that has made it great is the denizens. It has been a real privilege to work with such a group of smart, friendly, hard-working people. I will really miss our lunches and generally just being part of such an awesome group. It has also been cool to see the office grow from a handful of engineers working on similar things to an office full of people working on graphic design, privacy and security, research work, and of course platform engineering.

Some small things that have been cool: Kohu Road cafe (great ice cream, pretty good coffee, next door to the Project), proper Indian food (in Sandringham and Mount Roskill, Urban Turban, Rasoi. So good to have authentic stuff rather than the kiwi-Indian crap you get everywhere else), the fact that being in a mixed-race relationship is not unusual (and just being much more culturally diverse than the rest of NZ), Piha beach (so nice, so close, and a nice ride on the bike to get there), some fantastic cakes at cafes around Newmarket (in particular Little and Friday, mmmm), the view from my deck over Lynfield Cove and Blockhouse Bay - so lovely.

And some bad things - commuting (I have really got used to not commuting in NZ) and the traffic (oh God, the traffic), public transport (a city as large as Auckland needs decent public transport, without it I find it hard to take advantage of the nightlife or lots of other cool stuff, and also see the traffic), rude people (not as bad as England, but much worse than the rest of NZ, also see traffic again), lack of nearby rock and snow (this really pains me), our landlords (who booted us out six months into a one year contract and then got pissy that we hadn't dusted the blinds or cleaned the drains), the coffee (I thought Auckland was meant to be a Mecca for coffee, but it has been invariably terrible, I think I've had one really good cup all year (Coffee Supreme, Ponsonby)), food in general (too expensive, and for a city of its size, not so many vegetarian options, especially at the weekend), the weather (hot, humid, and lots of rain), probably some other stuff, but I should stop moaning.

I am glad to have spent the year here (the work stuff and the friends I've met have made it worth it), but I would not be keen to come back.

How To Win Benchmarks And Influence People

ParticleAcceleration is a Microsoft demo. If you follow the link, you'll see lots of little spheres arranged in a big sphere, rotating slowly. It's kind of pretty. But as a benchmark, it is misleading. For many combinations of browser, platform, and graphics library, neither canvas nor math performance is the limiting factor; something strange is going on.
    
If you view the page source for the benchmark, then you'll see two background divs - the faint background gradient you can see behind the spinning balls. Why two? One is a gradient from #FFFFFF (white) to #BFBFBF (grey) and the other is from #FFFFFF to #BEBEBE (almost exactly the same grey). Every frame, the divs are swapped (to be precise: one is set to display:none and the other to display:block). This happens so fast and the gradients are so similar that the user cannot see the difference. I don't think there can be any purpose other than to confound browsers that are slow at repeatedly drawing gradients.
    
The demo presents itself as a benchmark of canvas performance*, not rapid switching between slightly different gradients. Releasing benchmarks like this is bad for the web. They put pressure on browser vendors (like us) to devote time and resources into optimising for artificial scenarios, and away from improving the real web experience for users.

Thanks to mayankleoboy1 for the initial bug report (806044) and Matt Woodrow for the detective work.  



*from the page: "Thanks for checking out this Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview demo. This demo uses mathematical models to draw the particles in 3D, using the 2D Context HTML5 Canvas. The faster your underlying browser and computer, the higher your score and faster the particles will spin."

Appendix: some details, in case you are interested

The specific optimisation I imagine the benchmark is designed to exploit is caching gradients. Drawing gradients is expensive, so some caching makes sense. All modern browsers cache parts of a rendered web page. In Firefox, this can happen in multiple places, but primarily in the layers system. A gradient that doesn't change will only be drawn once into a layer and then retained. Once a rendered layer disappears (e.g., you move away from the web page or, as in this case, the div gets set to display:none) it is discarded (not straight away, but pretty soon). So for this benchmark we have to redraw the gradient when it reappears. On Windows, Direct2D caches gradients for us. So, if a gradient is redrawn soon after it was originally drawn it is cheap, and we are fast. I assume this is why IE is fast here too (Firefox, IE, and Chrome all get the maximum 60fps on my Windows machine).

Using the Cairo canvas backend (which we do for Linux, Android, older versions of Windows, and if your drivers are not up to date) knocks our frame rate from 60fps to 6fps. Here, we don't get the gradient caching behaviour from the graphics library. Removing the code from the benchmark that draws the gradients brings us back up to 11fps (yes, Direct2D is much faster than Cairo, even without the gradients. That is why we use it where we can!). So in the Cairo case, drawing the gradients uses about half our processor cycles. The Skia backend is even more affected by the gradients - 15fps and 50fps with and without the gradients. That is, the important parts of the benchmark use less than a third of the total cycles of the original benchmark.

It is possible to cache gradients within the browser. I think Webkit does this, and we are considering doing that within Azure. The downside to all that caching is that gradients take up a lot of memory and caching them in multiple places (and potentially in both CPU and GPU memory) is not good for our memory footprint. We have already had crashes due to running out of memory where a (faulty) driver has cached too many gradients for us.