1710795 - Documentation does not provide insight into recommended performance settings functionality

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[hopfenmueller]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:88.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/88.0

Steps to reproduce:

Searching the documentation regarding insights into "recommended performance settings checkbox" functionality.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings

Actual results:

The Documentation does not provide any insight into the "recommended performance settings checkbox" functionality.

Expected results:

The Documentation should provide insights into the "recommended performance settings checkbox" functionality.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Performance' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Hi hopfenmueller,

(In reply to hopfenmueller from comment #0)

Actual results:
The Documentation does not provide any insight into the "recommended performance settings checkbox" functionality.

Expected results:
The Documentation should provide insights into the "recommended performance settings checkbox" functionality.

Could you provide a bit more detail about what you feel is missing?

Your assessment that it "does not provide any insight" doesn't feel quite accurate. The documentation page that you linked (
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings ) does mention the checkbox, and it says that if you uncheck it then you can configure several performance-related options (and it goes into some detail about each). That's in fact the whole point of this documentation page. :)

If there's something that's left unclear that you think needs documenting, then it'd be great if you could say which specific piece feels unclear/missing.

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(and if you have the checkbox checked, then the idea is that these settings -- the ones described in that page -- are simply set to their default/recommended values.)

Comment 4

[hopfenmueller]

Hi dholbert,

thanks for the feedback and sorry for the late reply. Also sorry I agree my description is indeed not really too helpful or detailed.
The point I miss is explicitly the question about the recommended settings. I can understand what the individual numerical levels mean - but what I would like to understand and find in the end in the documentation - is where the recommended settings come from. Are these values set based on my system specs? Does Firefox analyze my system for this? Or would the recommended settings be identical whether I have 512 mb ram or 32Gb ram. I hope this helps to better describe my concerns. Sorry again for the initial bad wording

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to hopfenmueller from comment #4)

what I would like to understand and find in the end in the documentation - is where the recommended settings come from. Are these values set based on my system specs? Does Firefox analyze my system for this? [...]
Or would the recommended settings be identical whether I have 512 mb ram or 32Gb ram.

There are two settings, and the MDN page that you linked to says there's a single default setting for each setting.

Quoting the page's notes on these default values:

Use hardware acceleration when available: [...] This box is checked by default but the feature isn't available for all graphics processors.
Content process limit: [...] The default is eight. Having more content processes can improve performance when using multiple tabs but it will also use more memory. You can reduce the number of content processes if your computer is running out of memory.

(Note that we're actually changing the content-process behavior soon, in an effort we're calling "fission"; you can read https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-site-isolation-security-architecture/ for more on that.)

Hopefully this answers your questions. I'm going to close this bug as INVALID since it doesn't sound like there are any issues with Firefox itself (no bugs or code changes needed here).