1301693 - Make it easier for end-users to send performance profiles

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Gecko Profiler, defect)

Description

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

We're trying to diagnose bug 1300411, and we're really kinda in the dark. We've got users reporting these tab spinner problems, but no actionable data - just hypotheses.

What we really need are performance profiles. I've started reaching out to affected users to try to get them to send me some profiles.

I've been sending them this document:

https://github.com/mikeconley/getting-profiles-from-users/blob/master/48.0.2.md

I've tried to keep the instructions simple, but maaaaan we should make it a lot easier for users to send us these things. Some ideas are:

1) Package the Gecko Profiler Add-on (or something simpler / similar) in our Nightly builds by default
2) Give the Gecko Profiler Add-on a simpler mode that will take the recording, symbolicate it, share it (with user approval), and copy the URL to the clipboard, in one step. All without having to open Cleopatra.

The more steps we can cut from the document I posted, the better.

Comment 1

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

what would be awesome is if we could detect slowness in its various forms, take a profile and then prompt the user with "hey, it looks like firefox is running slowly, can we submit a profile to help diagnose and fix what's going on?"

Comment 2

[The 8472]

Note that due to bug 1263595 the profiler is prone to deadlocks and crashes. You might want to warn users about that possibility.

Comment 3

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

fixing that would block doing this

Comment 4

[The 8472]

another concern is privacy, the profiler output contains the source domains of scripts. at least the user should be warned about that.

Comment 5

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to The 8472 from comment #4)
> another concern is privacy, the profiler output contains the source domains
> of scripts. at least the user should be warned about that.

Same as crash reports, these should be treated similarly

Comment 6

[Gerald Squelart (he/him) (not at Mozilla since 2022-09-15)]

The way to run the profiler has changed a lot, so I'll mark this bug fixed.

Mike: Hopefully you don't point at your old instructions anymore 😄. Now it's more like: Visit profiler.firefox.com, click "enable toolbar button", click "Start" or ctrl+shift+1, do something, ctrl+shift+2, "Upload..." and share the short link.

Brad: Your suggestion seemed tangential, so I'll cancel the old NI. We have this kind of idea in a backlog, so it may yet happen...

The 8472: About privacy, when you want to share a profile there are options to remove parts of the data.