1497692 - Run minidump-analyzer at a lower process priority

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, enhancement)

Description

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

minidump-analyzer is run whenever we experience a crash - it's a separate process that attempts to gather stack traces from a crash dump.

My hypothesis is that, especially in the case of a content process crash, what a user is likely going to want to do is to get moving immediately back to the task that the crash interrupted.

I think we do them a slight disservice if the minidump-analyzer is stealing valuable CPU cycles right at the time when they're likely annoyed by a crash, and want their computer to go back to what it was doing before.

One thing we might try is to see if we can run the minidump-analyzer at a lower process priority. I suppose this has the added risk of the computer shutting down before the dump is properly analyzed (since we're effectively slowing down the process of getting the stacks).

Comment 1

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Thoughts on this, gsvelto?

Comment 2

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

It's a good idea and an easy one to implement too. It should be a (platform-dependent) one-liner in the minidump-analyzer tool to drop the priority as soon as it starts.

Comment 3

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Thanks!

Comment 4

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

Attachment: Bug 1497692 - Lower the minidump-analyzer priority

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/f3d26ec88c8d
Lower the minidump-analyzer priority r=ted

Comment 6

[Daniel Varga [:dvarga]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/f3d26ec88c8d