1676876 - [research] firefox beta infobar-submitted crash reports

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Socorro :: General, task, P1)

Description

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Firefox nightly prompts users with a "submit unsubmitted crash reports now?" kind of infobar if there are unsubmitted crash reports when [FIXME: some event happens].

The Fission project is changing which work is done by which processes. This radically changes things and we can't connect Fission processes to tabs to prompt users when the process crashes. Thus we don't know how many Fission-related crash reports aren't being submitted.

They want to change Firefox to prompt users to submit unsubmitted crash reports for the beta channel.

This bug covers figuring out how that affects Socorro and what we want to do to prepare for that.

Comment 1

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Questions:

1. When would Firefox beta prompt users about unsubmitted crashes? Every update? First update after a version update?
2. What's the ballpark estimate for how many crash reports we're talking about?
3. Will crash reports be submitted all at once or over some period of time?

Maybe we can estimate based on what we see with nightly? Maybe graph total crash reports and crash reports submitted from infobar for a nightly major version per day? Per hour? Then extrapolate that with how many crash reports we get for beta channel?

Comment 2

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Firefox nightly prompts users about unsubmitted crashes 10 minutes after startup:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/modules/ContentCrashHandlers.jsm#37-38

Presumably, Firefox beta would do the same.

I think that we'll see some "bunch of crashes come in after an update goes out", but probably not huge spikes since betas come out like twice a week.

Comment 3

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

I put together a STMO query based on the telemetry.socorro_crash data:

https://sql.telemetry.mozilla.org/queries/76244/source#190169

Looking at the "nightly" tab, I see these things:

1. Total number of incoming crash reports from the nightly channel is under 100 hourly (ignoring spikes).
2. There are spikes that come and go pretty quickly.
3. 85% of incoming crash reports for nightly have SubmittedFromInfobar=1. At the time of this writing, that's 51,000 infobar and 60,000 total over 28 days.

Looking at the "beta" tab, I see these things:

1. Total number of incoming crash reports from the beta channel ranges from 80 to 400 hourly.
2. The number of incoming crash reports is pretty steady--there aren't spikes.
3. 2% of incoming crash reports for beta have SubmittedFromInfobar=1. At the time of this writing, that's 2,000 infobar and 100,000 total over 28 days.

My intuition suggests we should see an initial set of spikes as queued up unsubmitted crash reports are submitted, but over the long term, we won't see spikes as often as we do in nightly.

If the ratios stay the same, we'd be going from 2% to 85% of incoming crashes with SubmittedFromInfobar=1 for Beta channel. Then the hourly rate goes to 533 to 2666 per hour. For perspective, Socorro currently gets between 2500 and 5000 crash reports per hour for Firefox.

Comment 4

[Brian Pitts]

Yesterday it looks like Beta is 7% of processed crashes and 0.7% of incoming crashes. I'm mainly worried about collector capacity, and this suggests that even large spikes in beta submissions would be within our capacity to handle.

Comment 5

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

gsvelto suggested we stop submitting crash reports from old Firefox versions (Bug 1677886).

Looking at the crash reports submitted during the 83.0b Beta cycle, about 72% were from version 83.0b*. So we could reduce Beta report submissions about 28% by skipping the crash reporting (on the client side) from old versions.

Comment 6

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

I think we're all set here.

The conclusion is that Socorro should be fine if we made the change and we wouldn't need to do anything to prepare for it.