When we hear reports about performance problems in Firefox, the first question that always gets asked is, “Can you give me a way to reproduce it?”  Problems that are intermittent or that might be specific to a particular user’s system are very hard to analyze for us, because we can’t bring the tools that we have to bear without being able to see the problem for ourselves.

However, there are some free tools that can be used by users to capture some of this data.  In particular, on Windows, very useful data can be collected using AMD’s CodeAnalyst tool.  I’ve created a how-to guide on how to capture this data on MDC:

Profiling with AMD CodeAnalyst

AMD has done a great job with this tool, and I hope that they continue development on it.  The instructions and the tool itself are straightforward for any tech-savvy user to follow, so I hope that those of you who are seeing performance bugs, whether intermittent or otherwise, give it a shot.  Collecting that data makes it much easier for us to track down the problem that might be happening.

Please let me know if there’s anything that needs to be clarified in the how-to, or if there’s additional information you’d like to see there.