1065496 - Search activity telemetry event counts seem low

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Search Activity, defect)

Description

[:Margaret Leibovic]

I'm worried that we're not actually properly recording the events from our probes, since there are waaay fewer search activity events than other UI events in Nightly.

rnewman, do you know what could be going wrong here?

Comment 1

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

A few things.

If Gecko never starts before our app is killed, telemetry events that were recorded from the search activity will be dropped on the floor.

If it does start, and for some reason our assumption about queuing events is wrong, we could drop events on the floor.

(We're assuming that if you call Telemetry.*, it'll queue events to be sent to Gecko when the Gecko thread finally starts.)

A low count sounds a bit like we're only recording searches when Nightly was already running, which often won't be the case.

Comment 2

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to Richard Newman [:rnewman] from comment #1)
> A few things.
> 
> If Gecko never starts before our app is killed, telemetry events that were
> recorded from the search activity will be dropped on the floor.
> 
> If it does start, and for some reason our assumption about queuing events is
> wrong, we could drop events on the floor.
> 
> (We're assuming that if you call Telemetry.*, it'll queue events to be sent
> to Gecko when the Gecko thread finally starts.)

This is what the code claims to do, btw. Telemetry calls:

        GeckoAppShell.sendEventToGecko(geckoEvent);

which is:

    public static void sendEventToGecko(GeckoEvent e) {
        if (e == null) {
            throw new IllegalArgumentException("e cannot be null.");
        }

        if (GeckoThread.checkLaunchState(GeckoThread.LaunchState.GeckoRunning)) {
            notifyGeckoOfEvent(e);
            // Gecko will copy the event data into a normal C++ object. We can recycle the event now.
            e.recycle();
            return;
        }

        // Throws if unable to add the event due to capacity restrictions.
        PENDING_EVENTS.add(e);
    }

    static void sendPendingEventsToGecko() {
        try {
            while (!PENDING_EVENTS.isEmpty()) {
                final GeckoEvent e = PENDING_EVENTS.poll();
                notifyGeckoOfEvent(e);
            }
        } catch (NoSuchElementException e) {}
    }


That last method is called when we get Gecko:Ready in GeckoThread.

Comment 3

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

This is an ex-Search Activity now (bug 1221344).