966707 - Delete old addons.sqlite and extensions.sqlite

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P5)

Description

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

These are chewing up over a megabyte of storage on Android. We should get this done for 29.

Comment 1

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

On Android we can add these two files to our background "pruning" service (bug 942611). We do not want any startup code used to delete files if they exist. We already do enough during startup.

Do the file deletion in the background is our preferred solution on Android.

Comment 2

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

We should consider using a removed.txt approach in the pruning service…

Comment 3

[:Irving Reid (No longer working on Firefox)]

My plan had been to use a timer in chrome JS to wait a little while after startup, and then async I/O to remove the file; this would serve all platforms. I don't strongly object to using the pruning service on Android, as long as nobody cares about recovering this space on Desktop, but I'd prefer to do it in platform where it will work the same for everyone.

Comment 4

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Can we do this by defining some portable format, rather than by writing code that runs everywhere?

Looking at our startup profile times from Eideticker, my reflex is to respond to every sentence that includes the words “chrome JS” with “hell no!”. :P

(Even if — perhaps especially if! — it involves a timer, which seems to just cause unpredictable contention while still incurring module costs. The time is still spent.)

We're dying of papercuts from module inits, startup functions, and otherwise prepping for runtime. Gecko takes three to five seconds to thrash its way to life on a phone.

We need to move to a world in which Gecko does the bare minimum of work at startup, leaving almost every module as a shim until it's needed to actually render a page, and doing nothing that's not strictly necessary for startup. 

(That we load stuff like WebappOSUtils.jsm, PermissionsInstaller.jsm, ContactService.jsm, etc. in the hot startup path is, IMO, a bug.)

I'm happy to duplicate simple features in Java to make that happen, which includes cleanup code.

Comment 5

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to :Irving Reid from comment #3)
> My plan had been to use a timer in chrome JS to wait a little while after
> startup, and then async I/O to remove the file; this would serve all
> platforms. I don't strongly object to using the pruning service on Android,
> as long as nobody cares about recovering this space on Desktop, but I'd
> prefer to do it in platform where it will work the same for everyone.

I think your approach will work OK for any platform but Android, where we actually have background services and different processes where we can run non-critical code.

I say 'OK' because in an ideal world we'd never want to run code in a timer to push it after startup. What if the user is opening a page? Or some other code is delaying using the same tactic? In anycase, this is a perfect opportunity for Android to use a background service and perhaps a #ifndef ANDROID or some other opt-out way for your approach for general Firefox.

Comment 6

[:Irving Reid (No longer working on Firefox)]

Go ahead and do it in the Android pruning service then; when Desktop decides they need to clean up old profile contents they can (hopefully) build something that shares the list of files to clean, so that we don't end up with errors from people only updating one platform's list.

Comment 7

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Sounds fair, Irving. Moving this bug.

Comment 8

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

filter on [mass-p5]

Comment 9

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Cleanup is always worthwhile.

Comment 10

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Re-triaging per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1473195

Needinfo :susheel if you think this bug should be re-triaged.

Comment 11

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.