1304384 - [e10s] Downloads should be managed in a separate process

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect, P5)

Description

[Vincent]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:48.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/48.0
Build ID: 20160728204513

Steps to reproduce:

Hi,

When running Firefox for quite a long time, it may happen that it freezes for some seconds. On Windows, the top bar indicates the program is not responding at the moment. I do not consider it as a bug.

However, in such situations, long freezes (> 3 seconds) may interrupt downloads. Some files will resume. Some downloads will restart. And depending on the server policy, some will completely fail (example: temporary download links).

And this is very annoying, in particular when there are big files under download.



Expected results:

Even if the browsing windows and tabs had to freeze, downloads should keep on working. So, be it as a separate process or in an isolated pool of connections or whatever, this should not happen.

Comment 1

[:Paolo Amadini]

For downloads over TCP/IP, even if the application freezes for a few seconds I would expect at most a retransmission to occur, and not the download to fail. Download I/O already happens off the main thread, though events on the main thread still need to be dispatched.

Maybe this issue could be related to the processing of messages between processes. It doesn't seem to me that handling downloads in a different processes is necessarily the solution to this, but the e10s team might know more.

Comment 2

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

I'm not sure if this is an issue. Networking is handled in the main process, so I'm not sure how much putting things in different content processes would help.