1307569 - [meta] Faster System Add-ons

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[:Felipe Gomes (needinfo for replies!)]

Meta bug to track the efforts of understanding and speeding up the delivery process of system add-ons

Comment 1

[Ritu Kothari (:ritu) (Inactive, please n-i to RyanVM, jcristau, or pascal)]

As we use system add-on updates as a mechanism to update release end-users instead of doing dot releases, we really should be bumping up the priority of this work. 

Consider this as an idea: System add-on updates are categorized into types: 1) "high" and 2) "normal" priority.

"High" priority system add-on update examples are:
1. We push system add-on update like disabling e10s on RU locales in Fx49 on release channel. This is an update that really is critical and should update itself quickly so as to mitigate end-user crashes.
2. "Websense" related system add-on update. This is another one that is time critical so we can update as many nowebsense users as we can from 47.x to 49.x.

"Normal" priority system add-on updates examples are:
1. Pocket updates to address functional bugs.
2. System add-on update that turns e10s off for a small subset of users that see tab spinner longer than 30 secs.

The update window for "high" priority pushes is 10-1000x faster (whatever is reasonable from a server load POV) than a "normal" priority push. By default, all system add-on pushes should be "normal" so as not to overload the server/client.

Comment 2

[Robert Helmer [:rhelmer]]

We have a pretty good idea of the uptake of system add-ons now:

https://sql.telemetry.mozilla.org/queries/2654#5575

There is a persistent ~6% of users that don't seem to get the update. These users have Telemetry enabled and also update (incl. auto-update) enabled.

The next step is to ship more diagnostic code so we can figure out why this is the case (bug 1307568).