1923941 - Firefox stops responding, 23 seconds in gfxDWriteFontList::ReadFaceNamesForFamily

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Performance: Startup, defect)

Description

[Littery]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/129.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Just open Firefox

Actual results:

Starts to not respond usually within seconds sometimes takes up to 5 minutes.

Expected results:

work normally.
I described the issue in greater detail on this thread please check it: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1g0m13u/comment/lr9zam5/?context=3
the thread is called there: Firefox is crashing all the time

Comment 1

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Can you clarify what "crashes" mean? Do you close it because it stops responding, or something else?
What do you see when it crashes? You mention that about:crashes only has old entries, which is confusing.

Comment 2

[Littery]

By "crashes," I mean that Firefox stops responding. When this happens, the entire window freezes, and everything becomes unresponsive, including the Windows 11 taskbar, which disappears during the freeze. The taskbar only reappears after the pop-up shows up asking whether to stop the program or wait for a response, and I close Firefox.

When I check about:crashes, there are no crash reports listed. It says, "No crash reports have been submitted."

I had older crash entries, but they were removed after I used Revo Uninstaller to uninstall Firefox and delete all associated files, in order to rule out any potential corrupted files. Despite this, the issue still persists after reinstalling Firefox.

Comment 3

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Those are not crashes, the app becomes unresponsive.

One possible way to diagnose what's happening is to record a profile, but it's going to be hard if it happens randomly.
https://profiler.firefox.com/

Without a profile or a crash report it's close to impossible to diagnose the problem.

Is the system stable otherwise? How does the task manager look like when Firefox stops responding?

Comment 4

[Littery]

i'm not what you want me to look for in task manager but it looks like this when I open Firefox there's 9 processes from Firefox and when I try to open a new tab there's either added one more it means 1 tab -> 10 processes or it stops responding and after it starts responding corresponding processes loads up

Comment 5

[Littery]

(In reply to Littery from comment #4)

i'm not what you want me to look for in task manager but it looks like this happens: when I open Firefox there's 9 processes from Firefox and when I try to open a new tab there's either added one more it means 1 tab -> 10 processes or it stops responding and after it starts responding corresponding processes loads up

(In reply to Littery from comment #4)

i'm not sure what you want me to look for in task manager but it looks like this happens: when I open Firefox there's 9 processes from Firefox and when I try to open a new tab there's either added one more process it means 1 tab -> 10 processes or it stops responding and after it starts responding corresponding processes loads up

Comment 6

[Littery]

Hello??
Are you gonna respond or what?
It looks to me like you're ignoring me. I replied to you a minute after your eply and now nothing for 5 days. I'm sorry if I have a wrong feeling about this.

Comment 7

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Without a profile or a crash report it's close to impossible to diagnose the problem.

This part of my comment still stand.

My question about task manager was about seeing high CPU or memory.

Comment 8

[Littery]

I see, sorry, I misunderstood and thought the profile is irrelevant.
About memory when it loads, its about 400MB and when it stopped responding it was about 1200MB. I had opened 8 tabs, 2 of which were blank (I didn't search in them).
CPU usage when it stopped responding was 35%
CPU Model: 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-11300H @ 3.10 GHz (Base Clock: 3.11 GHz)
Installed RAM: 16 GB (15.7 GB usable)
System Type: 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Device: ASUS TUF Dash F15 FX516PM

During the recording Firefox stopped responding 2 times. By the end of the recording it took about 3-5 seconds to respond after freezing. Here's the profile https://share.firefox.dev/4f8HpMm

Comment 9

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Moving to Core::Performance to get more experts eyes on the profile, feel free to ignore the automated message asking for a profile, as you've already provided one.

Comment 10

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

The profile shows that we are spending 23 seconds reading font information, in gfxDWriteFontList::ReadFaceNamesForFamily.

I could imagine that it might be possible to work around this Firefox performance problem by deleting some unused fonts from the system.

Comment 11

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

This bug was moved into the Performance component.

:Littery1, 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.

Comment 12

[Littery]

Attachment: about:support

Comment 13

[Littery]

Attachment: memory-report.json.gz

Comment 14

[Littery]

well I deleted about 80 unused fonts. It helped me to run Firefox and use it casually but I've noticed that it's using almost double the memory Google Chrome does. When I start Firefox it uses 550Mb to 800MB even after a minute while Chrome in 5 seconds stabilizes to 400Mb everytime.
Second issue I face is that when I search something and close Firefox and try to reopen Firefox it will stop responding. In task manager I can sometimes see that after closing Firefox 4-6 background processes are still running taking up 400MB to 600MB. They die after a minute during that time Firefox is not responding.

Heres another profile just recorded: https://share.firefox.dev/3BJDfMg

Comment 15

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

(In reply to Littery from comment #14)

well I deleted about 80 unused fonts. It helped me to run Firefox and use it casually but I've noticed that it's using almost double the memory Google Chrome does. When I start Firefox it uses 550Mb to 800MB even after a minute while Chrome in 5 seconds stabilizes to 400Mb everytime.
Second issue I face is that when I search something and close Firefox and try to reopen Firefox it will stop responding. In task manager I can sometimes see that after closing Firefox 4-6 background processes are still running taking up 400MB to 600MB. They die after a minute during that time Firefox is not responding.

Heres another profile just recorded: https://share.firefox.dev/3BJDfMg

Was this profile taken while the unresponsiveness was occurring? I don't see any unresponsiveness from that profile.

Also those memory numbers all seem fairly realistic. Depending on how exactly I account for shared memory and such with a single page open I see about 340MB in Canary vs 550MB in Nightly.

Comment 16

[Littery]

(In reply to Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten) from comment #15)

(In reply to Littery from comment #14)

well I deleted about 80 unused fonts. It helped me to run Firefox and use it casually but I've noticed that it's using almost double the memory Google Chrome does. When I start Firefox it uses 550Mb to 800MB even after a minute while Chrome in 5 seconds stabilizes to 400Mb everytime.
Second issue I face is that when I search something and close Firefox and try to reopen Firefox it will stop responding. In task manager I can sometimes see that after closing Firefox 4-6 background processes are still running taking up 400MB to 600MB. They die after a minute during that time Firefox is not responding.

Heres another profile just recorded: https://share.firefox.dev/3BJDfMg

Was this profile taken while the unresponsiveness was occurring? I don't see any unresponsiveness from that profile.

Also those memory numbers all seem fairly realistic. Depending on how exactly I account for shared memory and such with a single page open I see about 340MB in Canary vs 550MB in Nightly.

Yes, I recorded it while it happened. To be more exact, I opened Firefox Nightly afresh and immediately started recording till it stopped responding. Nevertheless, I reinstalled windows and it's been fixed since then, that was the reason I reached out here for assistance as I didn't want to reinstall it entirely.

Comment 17

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

Keeping this bug open for now as I believe more people are seeing this.

The Performance Impact Calculator has determined this bug's performance impact to be low. If you'd like to request re-triage, you can reset the Performance Impact flag to "?" or needinfo the triage sheriff.

Platforms: Windows
Impact on browser: Causes noticeable startup delay
Configuration: Rare

Comment 18

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

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

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 19

[Denis Palmeiro [:denispal]]

I don't think there's much to act on here. I'll close this bug and if there are other reports we can just focus on those bugs directly.