In accordance with a brand new report, Firefox has a critical telemetry drawback, and Android telephones are affected by it. The problem is with ‘Glean’, Mozilla’s “product analytics & telemetry resolution”. It’s anticipated to offer a “constant expertise and habits” throughout the corporate’s merchandise.
Firefox seemingly has a substantial telemetry drawback, and Android telephones are affected by it
Nicely, that doesn’t appear to be the case. A relatively critical challenge was identified over at ‘Bugzilla’. It’s mentioned that each replace to a Glean telemetry metric comes with a “massive CPU time value and a big disk write”.
It’s mentioned this occurs for 2 causes. The primary one is as a result of telemetry metric updates aren’t batched on Android. Every replace leads to a database write to the Glean database.
The opposite purpose is as a result of the Glean database makes use of ‘rkv’ in ‘protected’ mode. It’s mentioned that irrespective of how small the replace is, on each replace, your complete database is serialized to disk.
Why is that an issue? Nicely, as a result of telephones are “getting hammered with writes on all events: web page load, scrolling, video playback, startup”. Additionally it is identified that database serialization allocates after which frees loads of reminiscence. That, in flip, causes “rivalry of the malloc lock and slows down allocation in different threads”.
This drawback places a substantial pressure on the CPU, storage & decreases battery life
All of this places a substantial pressure on the CPU and reduces battery life too. Extreme writes are additionally not nice for telephones and will have a detrimental affect on smartphone longevity.
Contemplating that the problem is thought now, let’s hope that Mozilla will get on it, and repair this up as quickly as attainable. You’ll be able to learn extra in regards to the challenge right here, with extra info offered in a separate thread too.