1381369 - Sync service drain battery if after change something big of my synced profile on desktop

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Android Sync, defect)

Description

[Masayuki Nakano [:masayuki] (he/him)(JST, +0900)(away until 10/14)]

This is related to bug 1124369.

I sync my over 20 profiles on over 10 environments. On my Android phone, Xperia Z3, I installed Firefox (Release), Firefox for Beta and Nightly. And these profiles are in the sync.

When I restore bookmarks on my desktop or modify some unnecessary history items which are synced from old profile on VM or something is removed, my phone's sync services try to sync newer data a lot.

This causes my phone's battery drain (can run only a couple of hours!) and waste a lot of mobile data everyday.

If I disable auto sync setting on the phone, the battery life is back to usual state. Therefore, I believe that this is bug of sync service.

I usually see "Syncing...", but I see "Synced ~10 mins before" in the same screen (my builds are localized, therefore, I don't know exact messages in English version).

So, I believe that sync service should not sync multiple times in a day without user's operation, or it should limit maximum data size per day and check if it reaches the maximum data size when it stats again (i.e., I don't say, it should stop syncing immediately when it reaches the maximum data size).

Comment 1

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

You are very much an edge case -- most users have one or two profiles and don't frequently alter the majority of their records. If you're touching hundreds of bookmarks or hundreds of history items, those will all be processed by Sync on every other device.

Sync runs when Android tells it to -- usually a few times a day, plus shortly after you launch Firefox.

One of the complaints we get from users on Android is that we don't sync often enough -- the exact opposite of your feedback.

Particularly for bookmarks, it's not possible to just stop half-way through a sync: we need to sync everything or nothing.

There are other bugs on file for data usage -- Bug 802749 might be relevant to you -- but I think this bug as it stands is not actionable: it amounts to "when I make lots of changes, lots of data is transmitted", which is somewhat unavoidable.

It sounds like the Android system setting to not automatically sync in the background is exactly what you need.