Last week, I revisited the issue of super-slow startups by poring over another batch of Telemetry data from February/March of this year. There were 2263 Telemetry submissions matching the following criteria:

  • uptime < 5minutes
  • firstpaint > 30 seconds
  • uninterrupted startup
  • Windows OS
  • containing “appUpdateChannel” field (Firefox 11+)

I further limited my investigation to submissions with fewer than 5 addons, bringing the total down to 1209 such Telemetry submissions – a decidedly small number compared to the number of daily Telemetry submissions over a 2 month period. I was motivated to take another look at super-slow startup reports because Telemetry now reports Firefox startup metrics separately: select performance histograms from startup are now reported separately, as are slow SQL statements from startup.

As in the previous analysis, part of the startup woes seen in these reports can be blamed on Firefox occasionally trying to restore the previous session before painting the UI. There is a fix available in bug 715402 but it hasn’t landed yet. However, my overall impression is that these super-slow startups are primarily caused by very slow computers or computer resources temporarily being in very short supply while Firefox is starting. As such, we may not have many options for helping these users. This is a fairly typical timeline of a very slow startup:

14.406s                         main
51.110s                         createTopLevelWindow
62.344s                         firstLoadURI
62.543s                         delayedStartupStarted
62.547s                         firstPaint
62.584s                         sessionRestoreInitialized
62.614s                         sessionRestoreRestoring
62.684s                         delayedStartupFinished
62.688s                         sessionRestored

It takes 14 seconds just to reach Firefox’s main and then another 37 seconds to create the top level window, strongly suggesting an over-loaded system. It would be nice if we could confirm this through Telemetry, for example by gathering Firefox page fault stats but it seems that’s pretty tricky to do on Windows. Another very common pattern in the reports (also seen in the sequence above) is that the first real URI (not about:blank) most often starts to load before first paint is complete (filed bug 756313).

Slow SQL statements and other Firefox I/O activities definitely do contribute to the super slow startup times but, as before, their totals are roughly an order of magnitude smaller than the total time required for startup. In particular, STARTUP_NETWORK_DISK_CACHE_OPEN and STARTUP_CACHE_DEVICE_SEARCH frequently appear in super-slow startup reports, contributing several seconds each to startup times. Additionally, MOZ_SQLITE_COOKIES_READ_MAIN_THREAD_MS, MOZ_SQLITE_OTHER_READ_MAIN_THREAD_MS, MOZ_SQLITE_OTHER_SYNC_MAIN_THREAD_MS, MOZ_SQLITE_OPEN_MAIN_THREAD_MS also very commonly report multi-second values. Surprisingly, it also seems very common in these reports for Firefox to read over a megabyte from the cookies.sqlite database during startup alone. This flurry of activity likely comes from the first URI (the homepage?) being loaded and the previous session being restored.

Interestingly, the addons system also seems to be a source of slow main-thread SQL during startup:

  • RELEASE SAVEPOINT ‘default’
  • INSERT INTO locale (name, description, creator, homepageURL) VALUES (:name, :description, :creator, :homepageURL)
  • DELETE FROM addon WHERE internal_id=:internal_id

I believe these SQL statements are associated with addon updates during startup. There may be an opportunity to improve performance by moving more of these operations to a background thread.

Finally, there also appears to be lock contention between the main thread and the async thread on cookies.sqlite DB accesses, e.g. the following statements:

SELECT name, value, host, path, expiry, lastAccessed, creationTime, isSecure, isHttpOnly FROM moz_cookies WHERE baseDomain = :baseDomain

SELECT name, value, host, path, expiry, lastAccessed, creationTime, isSecure, isHttpOnly, baseDomain FROM moz_cookies WHERE baseDomain NOTNULL

This analysis was a lot quicker than the last since I had scripts for sifting through the data and generating the reports. The next step will be to follow up on some of these issues (homepage load before first paint, lock contention, synchronous SQL). Ideally, it will eventually be possible to automate analysis of Telemetry data and have scripts automatically flag troublesome SQL queries or regressions in reported startup times.