974207 - SafeBrowsing does frequent network activity

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

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

Thinking about power consumption, I have been looking at what network activity happens while Fennec is in the background.

I notice that SafeBrowsing does some network requests more frequently than I expected. I wonder if it is due to this pref:
pref("urlclassifier.max-complete-age", 2700);
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/app/mobile.js#620

looks like it will ping Google every 2700 secs. Is this reasonable? Should it be longer? How long could we go and still be 'safe'? Could we double or triple it?

Comment 1

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

That particular setting doesn't do what you describe (it limits the max cache age). But you're correct SafeBrowsing will probe for updates every 45 minutes. 

This is a hard requirement in order to be allowed to use the protocol: https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/developers_guide_v2?csw=1#LookupsAgeOfDataUsage

Comment 2

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

That said, we could suspend the updates while in the background, and restart them when we're foregrounded again.

The "restart them when foregrounded part" is probably pretty error prone, as we'd need to remember any attempted updates. Alternatively, treat being foregrounded as a fresh browser start, which forces an update in the next 5 minutes (but that may be way too long for a mobile browser and cause us to get behind, meh).

Is hitting the network every 45 minutes that problematic? Is that because this would cause the device to enable wifi and reestablish a connection? I'm sure my email client and whatnot cause way more network activity.

Comment 3

[François Marier [:francois]]

Once we switch to the new Google Play Services API (bug 1303393) this problem should go away entirely.

Comment 4

[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.