295758 - Live Bookmark update causes UI to hang with large number of RSS feed items

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 329534

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Ben Basson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050526 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050526 Firefox/1.0+

With an extremely large collection of RSS feeds, Firefox requires a lot of CPU
when checking for and retrieving updates, in some cases causing Firefox's UI to
become unresponsive.

A bookmark file has kindly been donated by the reporter of this problem for
testing purposes: http://donsingleton.net/bookmarks.zip

This bug appears to be reproducable on the Firefox 1.0.x branch and the trunk.
The finger is pointed squarely at the RSS update process since the problem (high
CPU / UI freezing) occurs hourly, the same interval at which RSS updates (at
least, I believe it is).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Download bookmark file and extract to profile:
http://donsingleton.net/bookmarks.zip
2. Use Firefox for a couple of hours.
3. Notice that roughly every hour, the UI becomes unresponsive, or CPU usage
increases dramatically.


Expected Results:  
Firefox should still be responsive when checking for feed updates. This is
certainly an edge-case (since not everyone will have such an extensive
collection of feeds) but could lead to data-loss.

Since this causes a hang, marking as critical. Please feel free to drop the
severity if this is unwarranted. I will ask Singleton (the original reporter) to
register a Bugzilla account and contribute where necessary.

Comment 1

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

likely related to bug 252412
It's just a different expression of the loading process in the background

Comment 2

[Rishi Maharaj]

Using the reporter's bookmarks file with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT
5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050527 Firefox/1.0+ with a 2.4Ghz P4 machine with
512MB RAM, the bug is not noticeable. However, using 1.0.4 official on a Win98
machine w/450Mhz P3 box with 256MB RAM, it hangs Firefox for several minutes.

Comment 3

[Heath Bates]

I have also been hit by this bug. If I remove all my Live Bookmarks this issue
goes away but about an hour or so after I add them back my CPU usage will go up
to 90%-100% for 5 min or so. Most the time I will have to end task on firefox.exe.
I have been having this issue since Firefox 1.0.4 and I have been testing
nightly builds for months in hopes that it would be fixed. As far as I can tell
this bug happens when refreshing a feed and that feed does not respond. 
I'm on WinXP Pro SP2 AMD64 3000+ 1gig DDR400 and Nvidia 6800nu 128.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050620

Comment 4

[Don Singleton]

I am Don Singleton, and this bug report was originally filed for me. I am still
having this problem, and it is VERY frustrating, but if it just cant be fixed by
doing the Live Bookmark refreshes in a low priority task (which would seem to me
to be the best way to address it), would it be possible to create a configurable
value which reflected the frequency of updates, so that rather than refreshing
once an hour, I could set it to refresh only every 4 or 8 hours?

Comment 5

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

You can change the value of
browser.bookmarks.livemark_refresh_seconds (in about:config)
to a much higher number.
This will reduce the update rate for all live bookmarks

Comment 6

[Don Singleton]

1.5 beta 1 seemed to really help. I still got lockups, but at most 30 to 45
seconds at a time, with 10 to 15 seconds free, then some more lockup

1.5 beta 2 had lockup almost all the time (not completely locked up, but at
least 90% cpu)

Went to 1.0.7, and it seems to lockup about 50% almost entirely. For example,
since I booted up this time, firefox has 3:16:35 cpu time, and System Idle
Process is 4:55:04

Don Singleton  [e-mail] 

Comment 7

[Hadmut Danisch]

Please also see bug 316005 . Certainly related.

 

Comment 8

[rs127]

I'm experiencing this in Firefox 3 RC1 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008051206 Firefox/3.0).  I have 17 live bookmarks, and when they update after the browser is first launched, CPU and disk usage spikes, and the UI is not responsive during this time.  If another another process already has high CPU usage, Firefox becomes completely unresponsive.

Comment 9

[guanxi]

(Using FF3rc1, but also saw it in FF3b5 and many versions of FF2.)

It's caused by the *number of total items* in feeds (e.g., news articles in a news feed), and not the *number of feeds*:

I experienced the same problem using FF3 RC1 with *only one* livemark, which had ~2,000 items in its feed. On my Pentium M 2GHz with 1.5GB RAM, it would hang FF for approximately 40 seconds every time it refreshed the feed.

To verify the cause, I varied browser.bookmarks.livemark_refresh_seconds, and the hangs would always occur right on time. I also verified it in safe mode and with a fresh profile (except for the bookmarks file).

Note also that user may not be aware of or in control of the number of feed items. I had setup the livemark months ago and forgotten about it -- until I identified the cause of the problem (which had gone on for months) earlier today.

Also, the typical end user will have a very hard time diagnosing this problem. What clue do they have? I didn't figure it out until I started recording the times it occurred and noted it was a regular interval. I'm an IT professional and knew enough to suspect livemarks. Most users I support would have no idea.

Because of the likelihood of the problem -- it isn't astronomical but I suspect it will any user with many feed items -- and the difficulty for users to solve the problem themselves, I'm nominating it to block FF3.1.

Comment 10

[guanxi]

(updating summary to reflect feed items, not number of feeds)

Comment 12

[guanxi]

If there are no resources to fix the problem, then just adding feedback in the statusbar, such as 'Refreshing live bookmarks ..,.', would be a big help to end users.

At least they could identify the source of the problem and take action. However, if they have more bookmarks then they can manually read through, then they encounter the problem that you can't search for live bookmarks (bug 437163) and you need an addon to generate a list of them.

Comment 13

[kappa]

Can confirm this bug is still present in latest FF3 RC2 on linux. This didn't happen for me on FF2 on linux.

Comment 14

[kappa]

Just to clarify this bug locks up the browser for 30+ seconds, also it takes 30+ seconds for the browser to start as live bookmarks are checked at startup.

This is really a show stopper for me, hope it is fixed soon, hopefully in ff3 final.

For now i'll stick with ff2

Comment 15

[nighty0]

+1

I stated already in mozillazine forums.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3392891&sid=8e32e1629d66e91df5de02c46eed18f3

Comment 16

[guanxi]

Duplicate of bug 329534?

Comment 17

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Looks that way, and nightly0 is already on that bug. Duping.

Also, this wouldn't block 3.0, leaving blocking 3.1? nomination, someone might want to raise that flag on the dupe bug, too.