817376 - With Facebook Messenger enabled, Firefox frequently freezes

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: SocialAPI: Providers, defect)

Description

[Peter Hollo]

Using the current Nightly (but I have tested it in latest Trunk too), when I enable Facebook Messenger, the browser frequently freezes/"pauses".

I presume this is related to syncing with Facebook in the background. It will occur sometimes specifically when clicking on one of the Facebook Messenger icons in the toolbar, but often it is when doing unrelated things in the browser. The pause can be a second or two, or 5-10 seconds. It's bad enough that I cannot keep Facebook Messenger enabled.

This is probably the same as bug ##812736, but it was not well-described and has nad no response in a few weeks.

Comment 1

[:Felipe Gomes (needinfo for replies!)]

Hi Peter, out of curiosity, how many Firefox windows do you usually have open at a time?

Comment 2

[Peter Hollo]

Hi Felipe,
I do often have two windows open. I did when I was testing.
When I have finished with the current window, I'll try it out with a single window.

For reference, I would have had 11-15 tabs open. I did try closing the only active Facebook tab I had open.
It may or may not be relevant also that I have 908 Facebook "friends" (side-effect of being a muso...)

Comment 3

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

We've received several other reports of similar behavior as well. We're going to mitigate some of this on the Firefox side in bug 811247, and Facebook is also working on some performance improvements on their end.

Comment 4

[Peter Hollo]

Thanks Gavin! I'll watch that bug and periodically turn the feature back on.
For what it's worth, I tried it with only one Firefox window open, and it "felt" better, but would still hang now and then, so I've turned it off again.

Comment 5

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Peter: have you been able to test the feature more recently? We've fixed a few issues that could have been causing your trouble, it would be nice to know whether things were better for you now.

Comment 6

[Peter Hollo]

Hey Gavin, thanks for asking.
Last time I tried was probably earlier in the week. I have found that it was (still) making watching Flash video, for instance, pretty difficult, as the visuals would pause relatively frequently.
At the time I had two windows open. I now have only one and have tried again. After less than one minute playing the video, the video paused for a second, and the same continued throughout. It has been worse than that, but this is bad enough to not really be able to leave Facebook Messenger enabled.

Even just interacting with the toolbar gives me some delays. Clicking the notifications button, it will take a second or so for it to close; after clicking on a message in the messages notification it will take a little time for it to appear. This may not be an issue.
The pauses in Firefox happen whether or not I've interacted with the toolbar widget at all.

10 tabs open in one window.
958MB (of 16GB) of RAM used by Firefox.
CPU usage not an issue.

Anything else I can do to help, let me know!

Comment 7

[Peter Hollo]

(Note: on the latest Nightly, 2012-12-21)

Comment 8

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Peter - this is great feedback, thanks.

Any chance you could try to capture some of the slowness using https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Performance/Profiling_with_the_Built-in_Profiler , and share the profile links here?

Comment 9

[Peter Hollo]

Hi Gavin,
No problem. I did a couple, once I worked out what I was doing. This one, if I'm doing it right, should just represent clicking around the Messenger widget.

http://people.mozilla.com/~bgirard/cleopatra/#report=82eed7b6eb5f16e1acdeefd02faf483e6885801f

And this one involves viewing a YouTube video (fullscreen) until it paused video.

http://people.mozilla.com/~bgirard/cleopatra/#report=115a2c1f49450d578b1fb3e4c558e568202cfbe5

Re Flash video, note that the audio always continues - only the visuals hang.
Also should note that while I was composing this comment, Firefox stopped responding again for a few secs. I have disabled Facebook Messenger again for now.

Comment 10

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Hi Peter,

Looking in the profile, it seems that you have Ghostery installed. Bug 815370 also involves performance issues with the Social API and Ghostery when combined. As a troubleshooting exercise, could you try temporarily disabling Ghostery to see if that fixes the issue for you?

Comment 11

[Peter Hollo]

Thanks Jared, that sounds totally believable actually! I've disabled Ghostery in the add-ons rather than just disabling its blocking functionality, and re-enabled Facebook Messenger.
Watching a YouTube video in fullscreen, it does seem better - but there are still occasional tiny pauses in video playback. They're quite brief but they're there. I did use to see them prior to the Social API anyway, but I'm not sure I've seen it happening that recently otherwise.

Here's the latest profile (again, I hope I got it right - viewed the analysis from today and uploaded full profile):

http://people.mozilla.com/~bgirard/cleopatra/#report=6d9e6de7b2f2d7fe7644d0f1b7a950cc54ff149c

Thanks!

Comment 12

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Mass-closing bugs related to the Facebook Messenger SocialAPI integration.

Filter on "dust-off-my-shoulders"