1553829 - 5-second lag on each opening new Firefox window from command line on all concurrent FF users except first since machine boot.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1553781

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Stéphane Gourichon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0

Steps to reproduce:

Multi-user Ubuntu system. Fast machine, SSD storage, firefox appears very quickly even on first load.

Users, when they want to open Firefox windows (first or subsequent) use global key shortcut which causes /usr/bin/firefox to be run.

• user A runs /usr/bin/firefox (which appears in less than a second), and keep it open, then lets user B switch to their session
• user B runs /usr/bin/firefox

Actual results:

• user B observes a 5 second wait before window opens.
• each time user B calls /usr/bin/firefox again to open a new window, the same 5-second wait happens

It can be timed:

userB $ time /usr/bin/firefox

real 0m5,105s
user 0m0,045s
sys 0m0,006s

It can be straced:

Before v67: a /tmp/firefox_$USER was created and not removed, leaving /tmp/firefox_$USER/.parentlock, which was not a real problem.
Since v67: the dir is /tmp/firefox with restricted permission, hold by user A. When user B tries, strace reveals this:

symlink("127.0.1.1:19986", "/tmp/firefox/lock") = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)

repeatedly for 5 seconds, then window appears.

Expected results:

• each new window should appear quickly.

As quickly as if the user had first focused an existing firefox window and pressed Ctrl-N.
Equivalently, as quickly as the experience of the user that started firefox first after machine boot. Actual example:

userA $ time /usr/bin/firefox

real 0m0,070s
user 0m0,023s
sys 0m0,023s

Comment 1

[Stéphane Gourichon]

Bug is a visible consequence of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1553781 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1553771 .

It was observed both on Ubuntu package 67.0+build2-0ubuntu0.18.04.1 and on official Mozilla build from https://download-installer.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/releases/67.0/linux-x86_64/fr/firefox-67.0.tar.bz2

Comment 2

[Stéphane Gourichon]

Importance: rather high on UX

This bug is really painful here because we use Firefox a lot and often open a new window from another application.

Impractical workaround

An impractical workaround is to hunt every time for an existing firefox window on one of our virtual desktops, focus it, then press Ctrl-N, then paste the URL.

Practical workaround

Another workaround is to put a bash script in e.g. /usr/local/bin :

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/firefox
rm -rf /tmp/firefox

It has proved efficient so far. Is it risky of some sort ?

Comment 3

[Stéphane Gourichon]

Better bash script in e.g. /usr/local/bin (propagates arguments):

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/firefox "$@"
rm -rf /tmp/firefox

Comment 5

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

This has never been resolved actually.

Comment 6

[Martin Stránský [:stransky] (ni? me)]

So it's Bug 1553771 then ?