1337321 - sync leads to high energy usage on mac

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Sync, defect, P3)

Description

[AM]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0
Build ID: 20170125094131

Steps to reproduce:

Use sync on a recent macbook pro. Several thousand bookmarks. 
Leads to machine needing to be charged after just 3h.


Actual results:

The energy monitor gives firefox at a consistent average of 40. If I turn off sync
I get much lower values (near 5). 

I get the impression that sync dominates totally the energy budget on firefox.


Expected results:

Longer battery life.

I actually discovered that this was the main problem when firefox recently become very unstable and I turned off sync see 1334968 , resulting in fantastically better battery life on macbooks.

Comment 1

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

I suspect that due to bug 1334968, Sync is never completing, so every startup of the browser ends up trying to sync all those bookmarks. In normal usage, this sync would be done only once.

Comment 2

[AM]

Danger of talking about two bugs.

1) Until recently I was not having any crashes, since the update to 51 I get crashes within one minute of startup.

2) Turning of sync eliminates the crashes.

3) It also solves the terrible battery problems that I was having. So I reported this bug: Before the new crashes sync was draining the battery in just a few hours. 

I used to leave firefox up for a couple of weeks. Bookmarks were synchronizing between different machines.

Comment 3

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

(In reply to AM from comment #2)
> Danger of talking about two bugs.

Indeed :) We expect that a full sync of a few thousand bookmarks is going to expensive in this regard, and that's probably due to that second bug - so we can see where this one stands after we try and sort that out.

Comment 4

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Now that bug 1334968 has landed, are you able to check if that has helped the energy usage of your Firefox? Thanks!

Comment 5

[AM]

It's a lot better. Better interactivity too -- clicking on Star no longer freezes for 10 seconds,

Comment 6

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Thanks for getting back - I'll close this as WFM under the assumption the root cause was bug 1334968 (which is actually bug 1309696)