1296572 - Firefox UI slows down considerably after use due to DOM storage

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect, P3)

Description

[joriswu]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0
Build ID: 20160623154057

Steps to reproduce:

Install Firefox 47.0 On Linux Mint with blank profile, observe reasonable UI responsiveness.
Use it for a month and observe sites like Google Maps and most others to slow down considerably. Scrolling becomes cumbersome and new pages take quite long to load.



Actual results:

Dependent on the site, opening new pages and scrolling becomes very slow. Mostly Javascript-rich and highly interactive sites suffer.

webappsstore.sqlite is 16MB and webappsstore.sqlite-wal is 1.5MB



Expected results:

Performance should not degrade significantly over time.

Comment 1

[joriswu]

See also bug 857888 which points to a possible underlying cause.

Comment 2

[joriswu]

After restarting with a single tab open on a trivial HTML-only webpage, VM usage is 1.5 GB (no extensions enabled)
Responsiveness is still low.
Removing the webappsstore.sqlite, and restarting again, the VM usage is 1.1 GB and UI responsiveness is improved.

Cleaning the cache does not make a difference.

Comment 3

[Hsin-Yi Tsai (she/her) [:hsinyi]]

Hi Jan, any ideas?

Comment 4

[Jan Varga [:janv]]

I don't know exactly where is the bottleneck in current local storage implementation, but I guess we should fix that as part of the next-gen local storage implementation.

Comment 5

[Hsin-Yi Tsai (she/her) [:hsinyi]]

Set this as P3 for now and we will review it after bug 1286798 is done.

Comment 6

[thomas07]

I would just like to add that this is occurring for me too
51.0a2 (2016-10-04) (64-bit)
Linux Mint

I have noticed that once the webappsstore.sqlite gets large? (20mb or larger) the Firefox UI gets very choppy and unresponsive at times. 

I especially notice it for SPA's and other heavy JS sites. AWS Console is one site I have this problem on.

Once I delete that file... Firefox works super well, and the UI is very responsive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/40gbos/psa_large_webappsstoresqlite_file_in_your_profile/

Comment 7

[Kenan]

I've been noticing this as a user on Windows as well. Keep a long-term session open with lots of tabs, and then switch between remote desktop and native usage (I think the graphics switching from native to software rendering is partly the culprit here) at least a couple of times will cause Firefox to gradually slow down.

Please let me know what else I can do to help narrow this down.

Comment 8

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Could anyone who can reproduce this provide a cleopatra profile? Hopefully using Nightly, but if that is not possible, release version is fine too (it just gives less information).
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance/Profiling_with_the_Built-in_Profiler

Comment 9

[Kenan]

Attachment: Firefox global freeze

Please review this profile I took.

Comment 10

[Kenan]

I think I caught a freeze in this profile (it certainly looks like it from the activity), but I may have lost some data from profiling too long.

Comment 11

[Andrew Overholt [:overholt]]

Comment on attachment 8803654 [details]
Firefox global freeze

Sorry it took so long to take a look here! In the future, it would make it a bit easier to use if you used the Share button in the profiler UI to get a link. I've done that here: https://perfht.ml/2pLnBdp.

A quick look through the profile seems to indicate that your computer is being slowed down outside Firefox. For example, it looks like the samples (which should probably be taken every 1 ms) are only being taken every 14 ms. That combined with some of the indications of slow painting, etc. indicate maybe your computer was under heavy load. Could this be the case?

If anyone can reliably reproduce with a set of steps, please post them here. Again, apologies for the delay here.