1880287 - tiktok.com - Live videos stop working after a few minutes, stuck loading

Status: NEW

(Core :: Performance, defect)

Description

[pbzin]

Attachment: Captura de tela 2024-02-14 101509.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:123.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/123.0

Steps to reproduce:

watch some live for a while

Actual results:

Tiktok live playback works for a while and then stops, it only comes back after reloading the page, this problem was already reported months ago and nothing was resolved, on Edge it works normally
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/18aosok/tiktok_livestream_bug/

Expected results:

video loading does not stop during playback
and if it falls it comes back automatically

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[Sunil Mayya]

Thank you for raising the bug.

I tried reproducing this on Firefox 122 on Mac and Windows machine and was not successful.

Can you please provide http logs for the problematic scenario.
You can email the logs to [e-mail] if you are concerned about saving sensitive personal information in the tool.

Regards
Sunil

Comment 3

[pbzin]

(In reply to Sunil Mayya from comment #2)

Thank you for raising the bug.

I tried reproducing this on Firefox 122 on Mac and Windows machine and was not successful.

Can you please provide http logs for the problematic scenario.
You can email the logs to [e-mail] if you are concerned about saving sensitive personal information in the tool.

Regards
Sunil
file:///D:/pablo/Downloads/Firefox%202024-02-21%2015.42%20profile.json.gz
I tried to attach a larger file but it gave me an error

Comment 4

[pbzin]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n66mCEC13cIIZZJReg8kabtX-X0QYecl/view?usp=sharing
The file was almost 40mb and I can't upload it here, I put it on Google Drive

Comment 5

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin] (he/him) {{ PTO until Nov 5 }}]

Thank you for the logs.
A quick look doesn't show anything out of the ordinary.
The requests to https://pull-flv-l1-va01.tiktokcdn.com take a long time to complete, but I assume that's because it's a live stream. It's only the HTTP response that's long, not the request.

Could you try opening the devtools console when the live video hangs, and let us know if there any errors there?
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/networking/submitting_networking_bugs.html#web-console-and-browser-console-errors

Capturing a video of the screen (with devtools console in view) when the bug happens would also make it easier to figure out what's going wrong.
Thanks!

Comment 6

[pbzin]

(In reply to Valentin Gosu [:valentin] (he/him) from comment #5)

Thank you for the logs.
A quick look doesn't show anything out of the ordinary.
The requests to https://pull-flv-l1-va01.tiktokcdn.com take a long time to complete, but I assume that's because it's a live stream. It's only the HTTP response that's long, not the request.

Could you try opening the devtools console when the live video hangs, and let us know if there any errors there?
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/networking/submitting_networking_bugs.html#web-console-and-browser-console-errors

Capturing a video of the screen (with devtools console in view) when the bug happens would also make it easier to figure out what's going wrong.
Thanks!
Yes, I recorded it, follow the link
https://youtu.be/RHNIzNF18Cg

Comment 7

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin] (he/him) {{ PTO until Nov 5 }}]

Thank you for the profile and video.
As far as I can tell, there are no relevant errors in the console, nor do I see the channels misbehaving.
The profile does show uBlock Origin suspending a lot of channels.
Would you mind disabling your addons and checking if the bug is still happening?
Or even better would be if you could check in troubleshoot mode: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/diagnose-firefox-issues-using-troubleshoot-mode

Thanks!

Comment 8

[pbzin]

(In reply to Valentin Gosu [:valentin] (he/him) from comment #7)

Thank you for the profile and video.
As far as I can tell, there are no relevant errors in the console, nor do I see the channels misbehaving.
The profile does show uBlock Origin suspending a lot of channels.
Would you mind disabling your addons and checking if the bug is still happening?
Or even better would be if you could check in troubleshoot mode: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/diagnose-firefox-issues-using-troubleshoot-mode

Thanks!
It still happens, and it's strange that you can't reproduce it
https://share.firefox.dev/42YsDCH

Comment 9

[Manuel Bucher [:manuel] {{ FYI: OOO until November 11 }}]

It still happens, and it's strange that you can't reproduce it
https://share.firefox.dev/42YsDCH

I see in the profile that the status of the live stream video is "Request was cancelled". I can't see for what reason the request was cancelled (cancelled by tiktok, cancelled by a bug, cancelled due to network error)
I myself don't have a tiktok account, so can't reproduce yet. It does stop the stream and show a login screen. It might be worth disabling tracking protection as well if that is interfering.

The video stream in the profile has the following information (probably missing some, because it seems like the profile was started after the page loaded):

{
  "start": 614226.1669785156,
  "end": 830361.2014785156,
  "name": "Load 1027",
  "category": 6,
  "threadId": null,
  "data": {
    "innerWindowID": 8589934640,
    "type": "Network",
    "startTime": 614226.1669785156,
    "endTime": 830361.2014785156,
    "id": 4964982195203,
    "status": "STATUS_STOP",
    "pri": 0,
    "count": 17047670,
    "URI": "",
    "requestMethod": "GET",
    "contentType": "video/x-flv",
    "requestStart": 614232.5528785157,
    "responseStart": 614276.5384785156,
    "RedirectURI": "",
    "fetchStart": 614226.1669785156
  },
  "incomplete": true
}

Maybe a http log could tell us more, but I think the media team knows better how to debug this. Moving to Core :: Media for them to triage. If that is wrong, please feel free to move back to Networking and we can continue to investigate.

Comment 10

[pbzin]

(In reply to Manuel Bucher [:manuel] from comment #9)

It still happens, and it's strange that you can't reproduce it
https://share.firefox.dev/42YsDCH

I see in the profile that the status of the live stream video is "Request was cancelled". I can't see for what reason the request was cancelled (cancelled by tiktok, cancelled by a bug, cancelled due to network error)
I myself don't have a tiktok account, so can't reproduce yet. It does stop the stream and show a login screen. It might be worth disabling tracking protection as well if that is interfering.

The video stream in the profile has the following information (probably missing some, because it seems like the profile was started after the page loaded):

{
  "start": 614226.1669785156,
  "end": 830361.2014785156,
  "name": "Load 1027",
  "category": 6,
  "threadId": null,
  "data": {
    "innerWindowID": 8589934640,
    "type": "Network",
    "startTime": 614226.1669785156,
    "endTime": 830361.2014785156,
    "id": 4964982195203,
    "status": "STATUS_STOP",
    "pri": 0,
    "count": 17047670,
    "URI": "",
    "requestMethod": "GET",
    "contentType": "video/x-flv",
    "requestStart": 614232.5528785157,
    "responseStart": 614276.5384785156,
    "RedirectURI": "",
    "fetchStart": 614226.1669785156
  },
  "incomplete": true
}

Maybe a http log could tell us more, but I think the media team knows better how to debug this. Moving to Core :: Media for them to triage. If that is wrong, please feel free to move back to Networking and we can continue to investigate.

I did this last log according to the http instructions, and the protection was already disabled, I made a new log by opening the log before and reloading the page

https://share.firefox.dev/3ThdF7z

Comment 11

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:jimm, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 12

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

https://share.firefox.dev/3ThdF7z

Loading appears to progress normally across the profile. Doesn't look like an addon was running at the time. Still waiting on confirmation that ublock wasn't the original cause.

Comment 13

[George]

I'm a regular user of Firefox (125.0.2) and I can confirm that I've experienced the same issue.
I also test it on 127.0a1 (Firefox Nightly), and the issue prevails as well.

Regardless, I want to pinpoint something that I've experienced.
After I switched #browser.cache.disk.enable to 'false'; I started to experience the issues with the Live videos.
If the flag #browser.cache.disk.enable to 'true' everything is working as it should on both branches.

I use Firefox (125.0.2) as may main browser, and I wanted to test to see if it's true. So, after I installed Nightly watched a few Live streams on TikTok, and I was able to watch the live-streams without any interruptions.

Once I turned the flag to 'false' the issue with loading the live stream started to appear.
On average it happened after 2 minutes and ~ 30 seconds.
I close the browser (Nightly) and restarted my PC (Windows 11).
I also, did a 'Clear Cache & Cookies | Everything'.

To confirm, in my case I only experienced the issue when #browser.cache.disk.enable is set to 'false'.

Please let me know if you'd for me to test this in other ways.

Comment 14

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin] (he/him) {{ PTO until Nov 5 }}]

(In reply to George from comment #13)

I'm a regular user of Firefox (125.0.2) and I can confirm that I've experienced the same issue.
I also test it on 127.0a1 (Firefox Nightly), and the issue prevails as well.

Regardless, I want to pinpoint something that I've experienced.
After I switched #browser.cache.disk.enable to 'false'; I started to experience the issues with the Live videos.

Do the issues still happen if you also set browser.cache.memory.enable = false ?

Comment 15

[George]

(In reply to Valentin Gosu [:valentin] (he/him) from comment #14)

(In reply to George from comment #13)

I'm a regular user of Firefox (125.0.2) and I can confirm that I've experienced the same issue.
I also test it on 127.0a1 (Firefox Nightly), and the issue prevails as well.

Regardless, I want to pinpoint something that I've experienced.
After I switched #browser.cache.disk.enable to 'false'; I started to experience the issues with the Live videos.

Do the issues still happen if you also set browser.cache.memory.enable = false ?

I checked, and it's enabled by default on my end. However, with the browser.cache.memory.enable = false the issue still persist.

Comment 16

[Calin Tanase (OOO until 22nd of Nov)]

Attachment: Nightly vs Chrome.png

Comment 17

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

Since nightly and release are affected, beta will likely be affected too.
For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 18

[Calin Tanase (OOO until 22nd of Nov)]

Attachment: High CPU usage.png

After leaving the live video on idle for over 5 minutes, the issue occurs. If I access about:performance my CPU usage is at 150%.

Note: was not able to capture a performance profile, got a compressing error when trying to upload

Comment 19

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

The bug has a release status flag that shows some version of Firefox is affected, thus it will be considered confirmed.

Comment 20

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

This bug was moved into the Performance component.

:pbzinwindows, could you make sure the following information is on this bug?

• For slowness or high CPU usage, capture a profile with http://profiler.firefox.com/, upload it and share the link here.
• For memory usage issues, capture a memory dump from about:memory and attach it to this bug.
• Troubleshooting information: Go to about:support, click "Copy raw data to clipboard", paste it into a file, save it, and attach the file here.

If the requested information is already in the bug, please confirm it is recent.

Thank you.