1256273 - [e10s] Hanging tab (website) produces spinning wheel in all other tabs

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1207306

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

I thought that the goal of e10s is to have different tabs in different processes. But as I have seen the last days, whenever a page is hanging and the yellow bar is shown at the top of the page, all other tabs do not show any content as well. I only see spinning wheels. That continuous to happen until the originally hanging page does not hang anymore.

I would expect that even if a page hangs, all other pages (tabs) can be used as normal. So nothing will be affected beside the one hanging page (tab).

Comment 1

[Blake Kaplan (:mrbkap) (inactive)]

For the first version of e10s, all content tabs are going to share the same process (which is distinct from the chrome process). We're going to work on increasing the number of child processes in subsequent releases (see also bug 1207306).

Comment 2

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

That explains it. Thanks Blake.

Comment 4

[Harsh86]

I know this bug has been marked as resolved but I think it raises an interesting and relevant issue.

As e10s is going to enabled soon in the stable channel of Firefox and e10s with multiple content processes is, lets face it, a long way from stable. The issue with the content process locking up and the user seeing the spinning wheel, I believe, is going to be a problem. It makes the browser *feel* slow and clunky even though the UI is still responsive. The perception of performance is important, something I've learnt from following the development of Firefox for many years.

I see the spinning wheel far, far too often and it concerns me as I think its being ignored and eventually will be retroactively addressed when the mass public complain. By that point, in some ways, it will be too little too late.

Therefore shouldn't it be wise to have some kind of plan to deal with it or at least a bug to track the dependencies. I've been watching these kinds of bugs, you've been here before. So I know the questions that you guys should ask:
* Is there any thing we can do improve perceived performance in this scenario?
* Are we measuring how often the spinning wheel is popping up using telemetry?
* Is there anything that can be done within the content process so that if a tab is slow, it doesn't affect the other tab too severely? Improvements like bug 715376 would be a start, no?
* It would be good to know what's the biggest cause of the spinning wheel (more telemetry?)

Comment 5

[Antoine Turmel [:GeekShadow]]

How this can be a duplicate of a metabug ?