931521 - Firefox not showing up in the energy tab of OS X Mavericks Activity Monitor after a restart, or running Firefox from the Profile Manager

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Edward]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2013-10-27 at 18.47.27.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130910160258

Steps to reproduce:

Started Firefox on OS X Mavericks


Actual results:

Firefox is shown at all as an application in the energy tab


Expected results:

Firefox should be shown in the "Energy" tab as one of the top energy consuming applications / processes

Comment 1

[Edward]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2013-10-27 at 18.47.18.png

CPU tab of activity monitor

Comment 2

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

If you change the View to 'Windows Processes' then Firefox actually does show up. And it also shows proper numbers for the Energy Impact column.

Not sure why we don't show up in the default 'Applications in last 8 hours' view. We should.

Comment 3

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

Both FF 24 and today's mozilla-central nightly *do* show up in "Applications in last 8 hours" for me.  I'm running in the Mavericks "release" (build 13A603), as opposed to the GM (build 16A598).  This is on a clean install of the "release" (not an upgrade), and I haven't made any changes to the default OS settings.  My machine is a Retina MacBook Pro.

Comment 4

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

You may need to wait 15-30 seconds for *any* app to show up in "Applications in last 8 hours", including Safari.

Comment 5

[Edward]

@Stefan Arentz:
Yes it does show up, curious.

@Steven Michaud:
You should be able to see in the screen shot that Firefox had 2 minutes 37 seconds of *CPU time* (it actually was running for about twenty minutes) at that point. And that was after restarting Firefox, before it had more than 30 minutes and was not showing up either.

Interesting though that you can see it. I do use the public release but not a clean install, I upgraded Firefox instead. I'll reinstall it and "report back"

Comment 6

[Edward]

Well, that was easy.
Reinstalling *did not* help. However, I did find sort of a solution

**Workaround**

"Disabling" the Profile manager -- ie. checking the "don't ask at startup" checkbox and restarting Firefox again did make Firefox appear in the Activity Monitor "Last 8 hours" view.

So the Bug should probably be renamed something like "Enabling profile manager prevents Firefox from being detected as an application in Activity Monitor".

Comment 7

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

Edward, you should have mentioned at the very beginning that you've been running Firefox from the Profile Manager -- which isn't the default.

When I do that I don't see Firefox in the Energy panel, either (under "Applications in last 8 hours"), though I do see it in all the other panels.  In any case I don't know what we can do about this, and strongly suspect that it's an Apple bug, and therefore INVALID.  I'll wait to mark it as such, though, until this problem starts showing up with other applications.

Comment 8

[Edward]

(In reply to Steven Michaud from comment #7)
Sorry, I agree, but it's not something I really actively noticed until I just restarted Firefox.

Not sure this is an Apple bug though, it's probably the way the profile manager starts Firefox. When I leave the profile manager open for half a minute it will show up in the energy tab, so this far it does work. However, since you probably run the binary "firefox" directly (again), it is now a child process of the first "Firefox" which obviously does end right after launching the real Firefox process.

A similar thing does happen when you run Firefox from the commandline. If you run "/Application/Firefox.app/yaddayadda/firefox &", it will show as a sub-process of Terminal.app, and after you quit Terminal, any trace of Firefox in said view is gone. However if you run "open /Application/Firefox.app" it will correctly show as it's own application.
So, I'm just assuming, but I'd bet a few coins on it that Profile Manager does run the Firefox binary directly currently and that running it through "open" instead would resolve this issue. ;)


In any case, you may want to mention this in an FAQ or somewhere, to prevent duplicate bug reports. I'm not upset or anything and understand if you are unwilling to invest time here, since it seems a really minor issue and a solution exists.

Comment 9

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

Note that UX branch Nightly doesn't show up either and I don't use the Profile Manager.

Comment 10

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

> Note that UX branch Nightly doesn't show up either and I don't use the Profile Manager.

Today's UX nightly works just fine for me -- it shows up as UX in the Energy tab.

Are you using some kind of launcher?

Comment 11

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

No, but I don't close the browser and only restart for Nightly updates. Maybe it has to do with restarting?

Comment 12

[Edward]

Are you restarting by clicking the "Restart Firefox now" button from the Firefox update manager? ;)

Comment 13

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

> I don't close the browser and only restart for Nightly updates

I don't know what this means.

Comment 14

[Edward]

Oh by the way, App nap does not seem to work when Firefox is not detected as an application. It seems obvious at first, but it might just as well be a display issue (because as the parent process is missing), as I don't know how it selects the processes to slow down. Is there any way to really detect this?

If the updater really has the same problem -- as Matthew indicates -- and if it does affect App Nap, then I'm getting interested in a fix again.

(Sorry for your troubles)

Comment 15

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

(In reply to Edward from comment #12)
> Are you restarting by clicking the "Restart Firefox now" button from the
> Firefox update manager? ;)

I restart from the about dialog, the update dialog or the "Restartless Restart" extension.

(In reply to Steven Michaud from comment #13)
> > I don't close the browser and only restart for Nightly updates
> 
> I don't know what this means.

s/close/quit/

The problem occurs when you restart the browser, not when you launch it fresh from the dock or Finder.

STR:
1) Start Firefox from the dock
2) Use some CPI and see Firefox in the energy tab (from the last 7 horus)
3) Install the "Restartless Restart" extension from the add-ons manager
4) Restart the application via File > Restart (Command-Option-R)

Expected result: 
Firefox shows in the Energy tab

Actual result:
Firefox doesn't show in the Energy tab

The problem seems related to how our restart process works.

Comment 16

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

By the way, Edward, the Profile Manager also uses this "restartless restart".

Comment 17

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

Right, that's why I used the same bug; they both go through LaunchChild.

Comment 18

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

(In reply to comment #14)

> Oh by the way, App nap does not seem to work when Firefox is not detected as an application.

Not so, at least in my tests.

I started FF 24 from the Profile Manager, changed the view in the Energy tab to "Windowed Processes" and waited about 5 minutes.  The App Nap setting for "Firefox" changed from No to Yes.  (My home page setting for Firefox is still the default -- about:home.)

Comment 19

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

I believe this happens for any restart, including a restart after a software update.