1289217 - Importing large history from Chrome causes Firefox to freeze

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Migration, defect, P3)

Description

[Jared Lockhart [:jlockhart]]

I am running Firefox Nightly 50.0a1 (2016-07-25) on Mac OSX with E10S enabled with multiple content processes.  I started the 'import history from another browser' by going into my bookmark/history manager and starting an import from Chrome.  I have a large Chrome history.  At the time I had maybe 12 tabs open, including video players.  When the history import process started, the entire browser locked up (all windows unresponsive), the video froze, and nothing was responsive for about 10 minutes.  Finally it finished and all my tabs became responsive again.  Is there some way to make this process take place in the background without blocking my entire browser?

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

The process happens in background, but any history addition sends notifications that that UI catches and tries to handle (maybe even bailing out early, but still it's thousands of entries).

I already suggested to limit our reach at the import, by limiting our import to the N most recent visited pages, rather than the whole history.
We also have some bugs around like bug 1107364 that may help the UI to take bailout decisions quicker.
Finally, we need a better batching solution (bug 894331 is a previous try at that, but bounced back due to other problems)

Comment 2

[ovidiu boca[:Ovidiu]]

Jared do you think this issue can be also related to e10s?

Comment 3

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

Dupe of bug 1249008?

Comment 4

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

(In reply to Jared Kerim [:jkerim] from comment #0)
> Is there some way to make this process take place in the background without blocking my entire browser?

That's already being experimented with using a Funnelcake build in deps of bug 1248077. Bug 737804 is about using this same background import for migration after first-run.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

In bug 1340115 we put a cap on the amount of history we import, and we've made various other perf improvements to history since, so I think we can close this out. If there are still performance issues, a new bug with a performance profile is more likely to be actionable.