1200169 - We should make the AddonWatcher more tolerant

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Performance Monitoring, defect)

Description

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

If we decide to release the AddonWatcher, we should make sure that, at first, it only flags add-ons that are behaving very, very poorly.

Comment 1

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Actually, looks like it's quite tolerant enough already.

Comment 2

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

After discussing with avih, we concluded that we should do this nevertheless.

Comment 3

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

New strategy:

 - if jank is above freezeThreshold (e.g. 5 seconds), report immediately; otherwise
 - if jank is below jankThreshold (e.g. 128ms), disregard; otherwise
 - if the latest jank was more than prescriptionDelay (e.g. 5 minutes) ago, reset number of occurrences;
 - if we have had fewer than occurrencesBetweenAlerts janks (e.g. 3) since last alert, disregard; otherwise
 - if we have displayed an alert for this add-on less than delayBetweenAlerts ago (e.g. 6h), disregard; otherwise
 - also, don't report more than highestNumberOfAddonsToReport (e.g. 1) at once.

In the long term, I'd like to display only in case of freezes, and let a better UX handle the rest, most likely at startup or once per session.

Comment 4

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Attachment: MozReview Request: Bug 1200169 - Making the slow add-on watcher more tolerant;r=felipe

Bug 1200169 - Making the slow add-on watcher more tolerant;r?felipe

Showing alerts more than once is annoying for the user and basically
useless. We therefore change a bit our strategy:

- if an add-on has behaved correctly for the last 5 minutes, reset our counter of offences;
- don't display alerts for an add-on more than once per 6 hours.

The only exception is if the add-on freezes the browser (i.e. causes
it to stop for more than 5 seconds at a time), in which case we
display the alert regardless of past offences, up to once per 10
minutes.

Comment 5

[:Felipe Gomes (needinfo for replies!)]

Comment on attachment 8698390 [details]
MozReview Request: Bug 1200169 - Making the slow add-on watcher more tolerant;r=felipe

https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/27967/#review25483

Comment 6

[Pulsebot]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/b94d7e7648e1

Comment 7

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

I had to back this out for making browser_AddonWatcher.js permafailing: https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/27729c6262ee

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/logviewer.html#?job_id=19285089&repo=mozilla-inbound

Comment 8

[Pulsebot]

Backout:
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/dd6d447fc6e0

Comment 9

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Comment on attachment 8698390 [details]
MozReview Request: Bug 1200169 - Making the slow add-on watcher more tolerant;r=felipe

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/27967/diff/1-2/

Comment 10

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Patch uploaded. Thanks for the backout.

Comment 11

[Pulsebot]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/e43b68cffc6b

Comment 12

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/e43b68cffc6b