1855389 - Slow startup on Windows with MSIX builds due to TelemetryStartup calling nsIWindowsPackageManager's GetCampaignId

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1830725

(Toolkit :: Telemetry, defect)

Description

[Solway]

Attachment: Firefox 2023-09-27 08.34 profile.json.gz

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/117.0

Steps to reproduce:

I have a issue with a slow startup of firefox. ~5secs
I cant seem to find the reason.

I deploy firefox over intune to multiple PCs in our business, and they are all experiencing the same slow start.
These are high end CAD PC's too.

My setup is:
Default firefox with homepage as about:home
2 Extensions, ublock and bitwarden.
Admx policies applied for setting (GPO) over intune. see here https://pastebin.com/V8CGNY4q

This slow startup, started to happening when i switched from the standard firefox msi installer over to the UWA windows store installer for deployments.

I have tried removing extensions. no results.
I have tried removing policies. no results.
I have tried clearing profiles/ reset etc. no results

Starting in safemode does help (~2 secs) but not sure why its not working with just default firefox.

Looking into the firefox profiler, there seems to be a delay in the main process. see the link below.

https://share.firefox.dev/3t9tpPx

From what i can see, there is a object "ZuWaitForSingleObject (ntdll.dll)" causing a 3.6sec delay? and that's under a tree called get msixcampaignId -> nslWindowsPackageManager.getCampaignId in the TelemetryStartup

I have attached the Firefox profiler file.

Actual results:

~5-6 second startup

Expected results:

~1-2 second startup

Comment 2

[Yannis Juglaret [:yannis]]

Thank you for reporting.

[:nrishel], we seem to be reaching WaitForSingleObject(event.get(), 30000); in nsWindowsPackageManager::GetCampaignId here or here as part of TelemetryStartup. Waiting for up to 30 seconds on the main thread seems unreasonable. Any ideas how we could improve the situation? See also suggestions from [:bhearsum] here in duplicate bug 1855445.

Comment 3

[Solway]

Note: i have policy to disable telemetry applied via admx (intune)
https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#disabletelemetry
however removing this policy doesnt effect the slow startup bug

Comment 4

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

:yannis This is a dup (or second symptom) of Bug 1830725, for which we have a revision in-progress. I'll leave to you to decide whether to mark this as a dup or depends on 1830725.

Comment 5

[Yannis Juglaret [:yannis]]

Thanks [:nrishel], looking at the profile from the user in bug 1830725, this is definitely the same issue as you suggest. Good to know that there is ongoing work there. Solway, please refer to bug 1830725 for future updates on this issue. We may ask you to confirm there that the issue is fixed once we have a patch.

While we are working on the issue, I don't think there is a configurable way to avoid the problem at the moment, if you must keep using MSIX builds (such as served from the Microsoft Store). If you can switch to regular builds (such as served from our download page), I would recommend doing that.

As far as I understand, this issue occurs during the creation of the telemetry environment, and that seems to run before the code that will actually check if telemetry is disabled through preferences. So it is possible that even with telemetry disabled, you go through the faulty code, which will create a telemetry environment even though this environment will not be used later.