614719 - Cannot stop Sync (cannot sync incrementally)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[dynamis (Tomoya ASAI)]

Current Firefox Sync cannot stop syncing but it's too heavy (UI blocking).

We cannot use Firefox during the sync since it is very heavy task and it block Firefox UI completely (not working in the other thread?).
It takes sometimes more than 5~10min to sync and users will think "Firefox is frozen, I should kill and restart it".
# tested sync data size is (I think it's not edge case):
# 30000 histories, 10000 bookmarks, 1500 kind of tags
# total data on the server is 12.9MB

Firefox Sync should be able to do:
 a. Firefox Sync will not block Firefox UI
 b. Users can stop sync manually (and continue later)
 c. sync incrementally not to take too long time for sync

Comment 1

[dynamis (Tomoya ASAI)]

To make it sure:

I'm syncing Firefox on iMac 3.06GHz Core2Duo with 6GB Memory and MacbookAir 2.13GHz Core2Duo with 4GB memory.

If I continue using sync (keep log-in to sync), it takes about 30 sec par sync.
30 sec freeze is too long (especially during my presentations!) and I usually make the sync disconnected (I only connect sync server before I leave the office).

And when I enable the sync (after using Firefox more than few days), it takes more than few min.

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

In part, this is a dupe of one or more bugs.  It's probably the annotation queries which are blocking, if you have that many tags (bug 584927).  There's bug 606353 which is the general fix for getting the heavy bookmarks/history disk I/O off the main thread.

All that said, the right answer is not "give the user the ability to manually avoid bad performance."   The right answer is to fix the noted bugs (and others, like bug 603489 (simplify crypto scheme to be much faster).