869456 - The Time Open stat is modified after crashing Firefox

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox Health Report Graveyard :: Client: Desktop, defect, P4)

Description

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:23.0) Gecko/20130506 Firefox/23.0
Build ID: 20130506030925

Steps to reproduce:
1. Install the latest Nightly
2. Start Firefox with a new profile
3. Open the about:healthreport page (go to Help menu and click on 'Firefox Health Report')
4. Install an add-on that crashes Firefox (for e.g Nightly Tester Tools)
5. Refresh the about:healthreport page and look at the 'time open' stat
6. Crash Firefox several times and look at the 'time open' stat each time, before and after the crash.

Expected results:
After the crash, the 'time open' stat is the same as it was before the crash.

Actual results:
The 'time open' stat after the crash is different - decreases or increases - most of the time increases (for e.g from 8 minutes before the crash - to 16 minutes after the crash).
Please see the following screencast to see how the 'time stat' is decreasing.
http://screencast.com/t/W9qVVWFNuz 

Note:
The issue is also reproducible on the latest Aurora, on Firefox 21 beta 6 and on Firefox 21 beta 7.

Comment 1

[u279076]

This could definitely skew the information provided in about:healthreport, especially for users who've seen more than their fair share of crashes. I think it's too late to address this for Firefox 21 since we already have RC builds. I'd like to see this addressed for Firefox 22 if at all possible.

Comment 2

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

Reproducible from the beginning (since March 27th) - ever since the URL to the final health report was updated in Bug 852782.
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=456cb08f8509&tochange=178a4a770bb1

Comment 3

[Thomas Huelbert]

can qa check is this is still valid please?

Comment 4

[Kamil Jozwiak [:kjozwiak]]

Reproduced the original issue from comment #0 using the following build & environment:
* http://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/2016/01/2016-01-15-03-02-35-mozilla-central/
** build id: 20160115055328 change set: 02398f2be72b
** OS: Win 10 Pro x64 VM (10.0.10586)

Looks like this is still an issue. If you take a look at the results below, you'll notice the "time open" fluctuates once the browser crashes. However, the one thing that I did notice was that after a browser crash, waiting a few minutes (2-3 minutes) and refreshing about:healthreport will sometimes restore "time open" back to the correct value before the crash occurred.

Results:
=======

Crashed the browser using the following code via the browser console:

>> Cu.import("resource://gre/modules/ctypes.jsm");
>> let zero = new ctypes.intptr_t(8);
>> let badptr = ctypes.cast(zero, ctypes.PointerType(ctypes.int32_t));
>> badptr.contents;

* crashed fx once "time open" reached 10 minutes under about:healthreport
** restarted fx, "time open" was set to 9 minutes

* crashed fx once "time open" reached 20 minutes under about:healthreport
** restarted fx, "time open" was set to 10 minutes <--- FAILED
** refreshed the about:healthreport tab several times and "time open" jumped to 17 minutes

* crashed fx once "time open" reached 25 minutes under about:healthreport
** restarted fx, "time open" was set to 17 minutes once again <--- FAILED
** refreshed the about:healthreport tab several times and "time open" stayed at 17 minutes

* crashed fx once "time open" reached 45 minutes under about:healthreport
** restarted fx, "time open" was set to 18 minutes once again <--- FAILED
** waited 2-3 minutes and refreshed about:healthreport, "time open" jumped back to 46 minutes

* crashed fx once "time open" reached 60 minutes under about:healthreport
** restarted fx, "time open" was set to 45 minutes once again <--- FAILED
** waited 2-3 minutes and refreshed about:healthreport, "time open" jumped back to 45 minutes

Comment 5

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1497137; component has been deprecated.