Closed Bug 948500 Opened 11 years ago Closed 10 years ago

Moving a large amount of bookmarks is slow and locks Firefox

Categories

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
Bookmarks & History
Version:
29 Branch
Platform:
x86_64
Windows 7
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
critical

Tracking

()

Status:
VERIFIED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: Virtual, Unassigned)

Details

(4 keywords, Whiteboard: [Snappy] [TSnap] [TSnappiness]) 

Moving a large amount of bookmarks is very slow and locks Firefox
I can also see this error many times:

"A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: chrome://browser/content/places/treeView.js:1100"
This issue also occurs when delete a large number of history items via either the sidebar or library.  The root issue appears to be that instead of Firefox dispatching the action to a back-end function/process and waiting for it to notify when complete, so the view can be updated, Firefox deals with the deletion/moving and updating of the view one-by-one.  The result is this horrible lockup for several minutes.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Keywords: perf, ue
Keywords: hang
Whiteboard: [Snappy] [TSnap] [TSnappiness]
did this regress recently?
Flags: needinfo?(mak77)
(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #2)
> did this regress recently?

No.  This issue appears to predate 2011.

Firefox should be handling such operations by batching the entire move or delete operation and performing it all in the background before telling the view to update.
Today I wanted to move about 3.000 bookmarks from one folder to another and I got these error messages:

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: chrome://browser/content/places/tree.xml:47

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: chrome://browser/content/places/treeView.js:24

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: chrome://global/content/bindings/tree.xml:77

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: chrome://browser/content/places/controller.js:308


Seems I need to move bookmarks partially, because I waited over 1h and nothing happens, only a new and new error messages where shown to me. Even when I checked don't show new error messages and continue working, I will probably die faster than my bookmarks will be moved....
I can understand this issue is critical to you, though moving thousands of bookmarks is not something we can prioritize at this time.  There are a lots of issues to overcome due to the legacy design of the bookmarks views. Btw, I suspect Release would be faster than Nightly at this time.
But you have in plans or near future changing this slow library design?

I simply not understand why I can move my 100-300 bookmarks in a few seconds in Firefox (in other browsers is nearly done instantaneously, but nvm, it's not this issue), while moving over 500-1000 hangs browser completely.
I also hope this in only hang and no bookmark was lost during this hang and forced close with task manager, because someone can be very pissed off about this, especially when slow backup fails with 0KB file ;)
(In reply to Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] from comment #6)
> But you have in plans or near future changing this slow library design?

Yes, definitely.

> I simply not understand why I can move my 100-300 bookmarks in a few seconds
> in Firefox (in other browsers is nearly done instantaneously, but nvm, it's
> not this issue), while moving over 500-1000 hangs browser completely.

There are various technical reasons, none of which are impossible to fix, but due to the nature of the project it takes time to fix them, it would be "easier" if we'd be designing a new system from scratch.

That said, it will happen, I just can't give an ETA at this time.
Marking as WORKSFORME, as I can't reproduce it from some time. Maybe bug that causes slow bookmarks backups fixed this also.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 10 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
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