720231 - Sync runs continuously - drains battery

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 722379

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Android Sync, defect)

Description

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin] (he/him)]

Attachment: Full logs from logcat

Device: Samsung Galaxy S2

What happened:
I found my phone really hot. Battery had dropped about 50% in 2 hours. I noticed the sync icon in the tray, so I took a look at what was syncing. Firefox Sync was running and was responsible for 80% of the battery usage.
When I stopped, a message appeared, that a problem had occurred. I tried to sync again, but the syncing kept running, probably in an infinite loop.

What I did:
I tried to sync again, this time while running LOGCAT. Left it running for about a minute, stopped it, then stopped logcat.
I took a look at the logs, then tried to take a open Firefox Sync (the app). It crashed. I tried it again, but it said that only one account is allowed at one time. Deleted the sync account, opened Firefox Sync and paired the device again. 
I synced it again, and to my surprise, it worked. (The syncing finished)

Still, there some Exceptions in the log and the battery hogging might be a real issue. I have attached the log, and replaced the URLs from the browser history with XXXX.

Comment 1

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Without log timestamps, it's hard to tell what exactly is happening here.

I would naturally assume a concurrency bug, but new records really are being inserted, so it doesn't look like we're just spinning when we should have stopped.

It looks like you have lots and lots of history records -- nearly 40,000. I could certainly imagine some edge case being hit there. Perhaps the consumer loop has got delay-stuck, or the fetcher is causing a lot of GC and thus generating records slowly? Hard to say.

I've filed Bug 720304 and Bug 720306 to possible ameliorate some possible contributing factors, but I'd need an earlier and timed logcat to get a better idea of what's going on.

Thanks for the report!

Comment 2

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

I have a Galaxy S running Android 2.2 with the latest Aurora nightly, and I'm experiencing the same problem.  I have a log with timestamps, but it contains personal information (i.e. browser history), so I don't want to post it to this public bug.  I am, however, happy to make it available privately to an engineer working on the problem.

Comment 3

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin] (he/him)]

(In reply to Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez] from comment #2)
> I have a Galaxy S running Android 2.2 with the latest Aurora nightly, and
> I'm experiencing the same problem.  I have a log with timestamps, but it
> contains personal information (i.e. browser history), so I don't want to
> post it to this public bug.  I am, however, happy to make it available
> privately to an engineer working on the problem.

What I did to eliminate the personal info:
Open the log in notepad++
Find and replace (check regular expression):
   https://* with https://XXXX
   http://* with http://XXXX
   Title:* with Title: XXXX
This should also work in other text editors

Comment 4

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Forward-duping this.

Comment 5

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Attachment: Galaxy S/Android 2.2 logcat with timestamps

Good point!  Here's a (mostly) sanitized log with timestamps.  I also sanitized file:, ftp:, and about: URLs, and I noticed that names of apps are written in the log file, but I decided not to sanitize them, as I don't care enough to do so.

Note: this file is ~220K compressed, ~3.4MB uncompressed and represents the first ten minutes of activity.  I started logging before re-enabling sync, and I stopped logging about a half hour later, at which point sync was still doing its thing (hence this bug).  I have the full 20+MB log file if you want it, but hopefully this slice is sufficient to diagnose the problem.

Comment 6

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Erm, shouldn't bug 723235 be made a dependency of bug 722379 instead, since this bug has been duped to that one?

Comment 7

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez] from comment #6)
> Erm, shouldn't bug 723235 be made a dependency of bug 722379 instead, since
> this bug has been duped to that one?

This should actually be a chain of dependencies. Thanks for pointing it out!

Comment 8

[mikhail sciberras]

This is not resolved
SAMSUNG S2 with android 4.1.2 has massive battery drain and overheating due to firefox background processes 
6 April 2013

Comment 9

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Mikhail: please file a new Android Sync bug with an adb log. Thanks!