698999 - Roaming profile is constantly downloading

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core Graveyard :: Profile: BackEnd, defect)

Description

[Mark B]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1
Build ID: 20110928134238

Steps to reproduce:

Hi,

Firefox doesn't seem to work with Windows Active Directory (Roaming Profiles).

1. Set-up a server with Windows Active Directory or you can use samba4 like we do in our office.
2. Set-up a Windows 7 PC to sync data with a roaming profile with the Active Directory
3. Install Firefox and Thunderbird (the latest stable versions)
4. Notice that general usage is really slow and I can't really do much


Actual results:


I get lots of random lock ups and freezes because it is trying to download the profile. There is not much we can do “sysadmin wise” but we think this is a Mozilla bug in general because it is trying to download the profile. 

Also on a PPTP VPN connection it also goes to a complete halt and I can't do any office work. One thing to take into account is that I'm on wireless. If I was on a LAN connection I think this would be better but I think you need to take wireless into consideration. 

Cheers if you can fix this, for now I'm having to use Chrome as a temporary solution since Firefox is non workable (although I've been Firefox fan for years until this problem). The problem also seems to happen with Thunderbird mail.  



Expected results:

Performance should be as if it was not on a roaming profile or at least cached so I don't get random lock ups. If you guys know a fix let me know I couldn't find one.

Comment 1

[Mark B]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_profile_folder  this seems to have fixed it some what and getting the sys admin to exclude Mozilla syncing and pointing my profiles to C drive instead of the active directory server. 

However shouldn't this be better managed in future releases, perhaps even with some form of compression before it's sent over the network.

Cheers.

Comment 2

[Stef.]

Same problem here.
We found a work-around that seems to work while still maintaining the profile in the roaming profile folder.

Edit:
%AppData%\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles.ini

IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0
Path=Profiles/xxxxxx.default to UNC-path.

i.e.:
----- profiles.ini -----
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=0
Path=\\windows-server\profiles-folder\userprofile(AppData)\Mozilla\Profiles\xxxxxx.default
----- profiles.ini -----

There might be a problem with obtaining the correct UNC-path while isRelative=1 is set?

greets

Comment 3

[Mark B]

I tried that, thanks for your comment but it still seemed really slow for me. The way I have mine set-up is.

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=0

[Profile0]
Name=mark
IsRelative=0
Path=C:\Mozilla\xxxxxx.default
Default=1

I still think it should be looked at properly. Even in FF10 it still slow.

Cheers,

Mark.

Comment 4

[Stef.]

Malfunction appeared again after 2-3 weeks, so the fix I posted doesn't seem to work.
Incorporated your solution, which works fine until now. Not a nice solution for roaming profiles but has to do the trick for now.

Error appeared to us from FF4.5 upwards. Although I haven't tested all available versions.

Somebody should have a look at this, I agree!

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Mark, Still see this?

Comment 6

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Wayne, Component "Roaming" is about a Seamonkey Roaming feature, not the Windows feature.

Comment 7

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I don't think that this is necessarily a bug. The profile files are not "downloaded", they are accessed via the filesystem, and contain fairly large databases of history and bookmarks. We don't download these to another location and use them; we use them in-place.

We are working to make access to these be completely asynchronous with respect to the main event loop, so it shouldn't jank the browser. But other than that, connection to a Windows roaming profile needs to be pretty fast to get a good experience.

Comment 8

[Mark B]

Hi,

I have since upgraded my computer to a Mac, and have a lot more ram. I am also plugged in via a Ethernet cable, and this massively helps. 

Thanks for all the replies and information.