582842 - Can't access certain sites after syncing preferences

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[Nick B.]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100723 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100723 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.8

I know this probably sounds crazy, but immediately after syncing preferences I have trouble accessing newegg.com. Sometimes it takes several minutes before the page loads (and all subsequent pages), other times it will eventually give a tcp reset. It took me a long time but I eventually narrowed this problem down to syncing preferences. If you don't sync preferences this problem doesn't happen. I've reproduced this multiple times over the past few weeks to rule out any network issues. I've also been able to load newegg.com in a different browser while reproducing this problem so I don't think it's a server side issue either. I used tcpdump to get a capture of the traffic before and after the initial sync while accessing newegg.com. The type of traffic after the sync was completely different than before the sync. This is the only site that I've found that displays this problem but there still could be others. This problem showed up sometime within the last month.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Create a fresh Firefox profile.
2.Change a few settings in Firefox.
3.Verify you can access newegg.com
4.Install Firefox Sync.
5.Create a new sync account.
6.Sync everything.
7.Set up another computer with a fresh Firefox profile.
8.Verify you can access newegg
9.Install Sync and configure it to merge data.
10.Verify that it did sync settings.
11.Attempt to access newegg.com (it will probably fail or take forever)
12.Redo all steps above but when configuring Sync, use custom settings and uncheck "Sync Preferences" on both computers.
Actual Results:  
After syncing everything newegg.com is either inaccessible or takes forever to load. When excluding preferences from the sync, there is no issue accessing newegg.com

Expected Results:  
I should still be able to access newegg.com after I sync preferences.

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

I certainly can't repro this... what prefs are you changing?

Comment 2

[Nick B.]

In the tests that I did I only changed the homepage setting. I changed it to google.com.

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Despite multiple attempts, I can't repro this, nor can I even guess at a potential reason for this.