1379583 - provide per-tab and per-extensions hardware usage statistics

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Performance Monitoring, defect)

Description

[daniel]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20170613225334

Steps to reproduce:

When Firefox remains open for several days, I notice it gradually becomes slower and more sluggish.  Sometimes I notice continuous CPU usage or a lot of memory being used.


Actual results:

For example, there is latency when clicking in a form field, the text cursor does not appear for 1 or 2 seconds and after clicking, I have to wait before I can start typing.  Sometimes when typing in a form it also stops responding for a few seconds and then my keystrokes all appear at once.

I looked at the help documentation and it suggests trying to restart with add-ons disabled or try re-enabling them one at a time.  However, as these problems only appear after Firefox has been running for several days, this strategy is not effective.


Expected results:


It would be useful if the user could see live metrics about CPU usage and memory usage for each tab/window and for each plugin/add-on/extension.

Then if a particular web page is responsible, users could close that page and the rest of their Firefox session would improve.  Many users would see the root cause more quickly and some would complain publicly about pages that are bad.  If a particular plugin is responsible, more users would be able to complain to the developer and it is more likely to be fixed.

For many users, if they are told to do something tedious, like restarting and losing all the pages they had open or testing their plugins one-by-one and if they can just click to open Chrome and it appears faster they just go over to Chrome.

Comment 1

[Kohei Yoshino]

You can find statistics at about:performance, or about:memory for more details. Isn't it enough for you?

Comment 2

[Kohei Yoshino]

(Just copy & paste or type those special "about" URLs in the Firefox location bar)

Comment 3

[daniel]

Thanks for that feedback.

Neither of those "about:" pages are mentioned in these documents:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-slow-how-make-it-faster
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-many-cpu-resources-how-fix

Looking at both of tools, I don't see anything (either pages or add-ons) that appear to be using significant CPU so it is not yet helping me troubleshoot the latency issue in my browser.

Some of the stats on the performance page are self-explanatory, e.g. "CPU usage", but it is not clear how to interpret "Impact on framerate" or "System usage", maybe it would be useful to have little popups that appear if the user moves the mouse over these, or they could be URLs that give the user more information about how to interpret them?

Comment 4

[Kohei Yoshino]

I'm not sure. Moving the bug to a right component so someone could answer those questions.

Comment 5

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

about:performance is being redesigned; mass closing the bugs related to parts of the current about:performance page that we are not keeping.

Our goals with the redesign are to reduce the overhead caused by having the page opened, increase the reliability of the displayed information, and make the offered information actionable for most users. The back-end work is being tracked in bug 1419681.