Project Async & Responsive, issue 1

In the previous episodes

Our intrepid heroes, a splinter cell from Snappy, have set out on a quest to offer alternatives to all JavaScript-accessible APIs that blocks the main thread of Firefox & Mozilla Apps.

Recently completed

Various cleanups on Session Restore (Bug 863227, 862442, 861409)

Summary Currently, we regularly (~every 15 seconds) save the state of every single window, tab, iframe, form being displayed, so as to be able to restore the session quickly in case of crash, power failure, etc. As this can be done only on the main thread, just the jank of data collection is often noticeable (i.e. > 50 ms). We are in the process of refactoring Session Restore to make it both faster and more responsive. These bugs are steps towards optimizations.

Status Landed. More cleanups in progress.

Telemetry for Number of Threads (Bug 724368)

Summary As we make Gecko and add-ons more and more concurrent, we need to measure whether this concurrency can cause accidental internal Denial of Service. The objective of this bug is to measure.

Status Landed. You can follow progression in histograms BACKGROUNDFILESAVER_THREAD_COUNT and SIMPLEMEASURES_MAXIMALNUMBEROFCONCURRENTTHREADS.

Reduce number of fsync() in Firefox Health Report (Bug 830492)

Summary Firefox Health Report stores its data using mozStorage. The objective of this bug is to reduce the number of expensive disk synchronizations performed by FHR.

Status Landed.

Ongoing bugs

Out Of Process Thumbnailing (Bug 841495)

Summary Currently, we capture thumbnails of all pages, e.g. for display in about:newtab, in Panorama or in add-ons. This blocks the main thread temporarily. This bug is about using another process to capture thumbnails of pages currently being visited. This can be useful for both security/privacy reasons (i.e. to ensure that bank account numbers do not show up in thumbnails) and responsiveness (i.e. to ensure that we never block browsing).

Status In progress.

Cutting Session Restore data collection into chunks (Bug 838577)

Summary Currently, we regularly (~every 15 seconds) save the state of every single window, tab, iframe, form being displayed, so as to be able to restore the session quickly in case of crash, power failure, etc. As this can be done only on the main thread, just the jank of data collection is often noticeable (i.e. > 50 ms). This bug is about cutting data collection in smaller chunks, to remove that jank.

Status Working prototype.

Off Main Thread database storage (Bug 702559)

Summary We are in the process of moving as many uses of mozStorage out of the main thread. While mozStorage already supports doing much I/O off the main thread, there is no clear way for developers to enforce this. This bug is about providing a subset of mozStorage that performs all I/O off the main thread and that will serve as target for both ongoing refactorings and future uses of mozStorage, in particular by add-ons.

Status Working prototype.

Improvements transaction management by JavaScript API for Off Main Thread database storage (Bug 856925)

Summary Sqlite.jsm is our JavaScript library for convenient Off Main Thread database storage. This bug is about improving how implicit transactions are handled by the library, hence improving performance.

Status In progress.

Refactor how Places data is backed up (Bugs 852040, 852041, 852034, 852032, 855638, 865643, 846636, 846635, 860625, 854927, 855190)

Summary Places is the database containing bookmarks, history, etc. Historically, Places was implemented purely on the main thread, which is something we very much want to remove, as any main thread I/O can block the user interface for arbitrarily lengthy durations. This set of bugs is part of the larger effort to get rid of Places main thread I/O. The objective here is to isolate and cleanup Places backup, to later allow removing it entirely from the main thread.

Status Working prototype.

APIs for updating/reading Places Off Main Thread (Bugs 834539, 834545)

Summary These bugs are part of the effort to provide a clean API, usable by platform and add-ons, to access/modify Places information off the main thread.

Status In progress.

Move Form History to use Off Main Thread storage (Bug 566746)

Summary This bug is part of the larger effort to get rid of Places main thread I/O. The objective here is to move Form History I/O off the main thread.

Status In progress.

Make about:home use IndexedDB instead of LocalStorage (Bug 789348)

Summary Currently, page about:home uses localStorage to store some data. This is not good, as localStorage does blocking main thread I/O. This bug is about porting about:home to use indexedDB instead.

Status In progress.

Download Architecture Improvements (Bug 825588 and sub-bugs)

Summary Our Architecture for Downloads has grown organically for about 15 years. Part of it is executed on the main thread and synchronously. The objective of this meta-bug is to re-implement Downloads with a modern architecture, asynchronous, off the main thread, and accessible from JavaScript.

Status In progress.

Constant stack space Promise (Bug 810490)

Summary Much of our main thread asynchronous work uses Promises. The current implementation of Promise is very recursive and eats considerable amounts of stack. The objective here is to replace it with a new implementation of Promise that works in (almost) constant stack space.

Status Working partial prototype.

Reduce amount of I/O in session restore (Bug 833286)

Summary The algorithm used by Session Restore to back up its state is needlessly expensive. The objective of this bug is to replace it by an alternative implementation that requires much less I/O.

Status Working prototype.

Planning stage

Move session recording and activity monitoring to Gecko (Bug 841561)

Summary Firefox Health Report implements a sophisticated mechanism for determining whether a user is actively using the browser. This mechanism could be reimplemented in a more efficient and straightforward manner by moving it to Gecko itself. This is the objective of this bug.

Status Looking for developer.

Non-blocking Thumbnailing (Bug 744100)

Summary Currently, we capture thumbnails of all pages, e.g. for display in about:newtab, in Panorama or in add-ons. This blocks the main thread temporarily, as capturing a page requires repainting it into memory from the main thread. This bug is about removing completely the “repaint into memory” step and rather collaborate with the renderer to obtain a copy of the latest image rendered.

Status Design in progress.

Evaluate dropping “www.” from rev_host column (Bug 843357)

Summary The objective of this bug is to simplify parts of the Places database and its users by removing some data that appears unnecessary.

Status Evaluation in progress.

Optimize worker communication for large messages (Bug 852187)

Summary We sometimes need to communicate very large messages between the main thread and workers. For large enough messages, the communication itself ends up being very expensive for the main thread. This bug is about optimizing such communications.

Status Design in progress.