951262 - Add FHR probes to measure profile and system space usage

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox Health Report Graveyard :: Client: Android, defect, P5)

Description

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

For Bug 942609, we're doing work to try to get our system space usage down to something less painful. We're planning to add telemetry for this (Bug 951253), but it would be valuable to have a measure of the population as a whole.

Furthermore, this is a potentially common cause of user pain -- too much storage on Android is a really bad thing. There's a big user benefit if FHR can offer advice based on space usage.

FHR council, assemble!

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

When we say "system space" what does that mean exactly? Is that the profile data, or the application itself, or both? Do we separate that based on whether we're installed on the SD card or not? Will this measure only the amount of space Firefox is using, or also the total amount of storage and/or the amount of free space?

I can definitely see how showing users their Firefox profile data as a percent of total space or versus free space could be useful to people as a support feature, but if we discover there is a problem, what are the remedies? Reducing disk cache size/history retention/something else?

Comment 2

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg  [:bsmedberg] from comment #1)
> When we say "system space" what does that mean exactly? Is that the profile
> data, or the application itself, or both? Do we separate that based on
> whether we're installed on the SD card or not? Will this measure only the
> amount of space Firefox is using, or also the total amount of storage and/or
> the amount of free space?

We want to be able to catch bugs like Bug 942611 (large files in our Android data dir) and Bug 947745 (huge databases in your profile), and correlations between environment changes and profile/app sizes.

The minimum for that is just the size of the data dir, essentially as reported by Android in its settings app.

If I could blue-sky, I'd say:

* Installed on SD?
* Total space used (SD and non-SD)
* Profile space used (so we can tell if users are getting bloated profiles or bloated app dirs).
* Maybe free space, too.

Some of that is likely to be hard to get or not a worthwhile tradeoff.


> I can definitely see how showing users their Firefox profile data as a
> percent of total space or versus free space could be useful to people as a
> support feature, but if we discover there is a problem, what are the
> remedies? Reducing disk cache size/history retention/something else?

Eventually, perhaps Reset Firefox. In the short term, doing a more detailed probe into which files are large, and recommending appropriate clearing operations, as well as running cleanup services like those introduced in Bug 942611. The minimum would be "huh, I guess that huge spike in disk size is why my Firefox is running badly, maybe I should hit SUMO".

Comment 3

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

filter on [mass-p5]

Comment 4

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1497137, this component is deprecated. Resolving this bug as incomplete, per :sdaswani.