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petea
Allow background feed checking to be disabled
This is should be a bug because auto polling of feeds is a new feature in 1.5.
I disabled it and submitted a pull request until it can get a real user preference. I really dislike that feature.
Sage keeps locking up my browser for several seconds at a time. Disabling Sage solves the problem. Perhaps this auto-polling is related? (will attempt to mod code and test.) Problem with: FF 22 and Sage 1.5.1 or 1.5.2b4
Modifying SageUpdateChecker.jsm to stub out the auto checks appears to solve the freezing Firefox problem. Also stubbed out the data reporting functions in SageMetrics.jsm. What the heck?!!
Does the unresponsiveness happen multiple times while Sage is checking in the background or just once in the beginning?
With the update-check code in, The browser is much slower to start. Also periodically (I guess it could be an hour apart, like the code suggests), the browser will all but stop and the CPU activity will rail at 100%.
Stubbing out that code fixes the issue. (I also stubbed out the "metrics" code.) Been running several hours now with the stubbed code. Restarted FF a couple of times (restoring previously disabled add-ons), FF starts much faster and I have not noticed any periodic freezes.
The freezes lasted at least 30 seconds and some may have been closer to 2 minutes. I have over 40 RSS feeds and 4 of them are often slow to load.
During these freezes, was the UI totally blocked or just sluggish? Can you tell me what OS you're using?
If you're handy with JavaScript, you might try adding a delay of a few seconds in between each feed load in SageUpdateChecker.jsm. That may help reduce the sluggishness.
FF UI would be totally blocked for 5 for 10 seconds within the "freeze" period. Task manager would even say the window was "Not Responding" Just very sluggish for the rest of a given freeze period.
This is on a Win XP machine. Haven't tried to replicate it on other OS's.
As for further experimenting with SageUpdateChecker.jsm. I hesitate to do that right now for these reasons:
- The main problem is intermittent (probably at 60 minute intervals, in hindsight). Makes testing a bear.
- I lost quite a lot of time already, just narrowing the problem down to Sage.
- From my perspective, I already have a fix: Disable auto-checking. That's a feature I would shut off anyway.
I'll make a back-burner note to try adding a delay if the _manual_ feed check seems too sluggish (but I can tolerate a freeze or two on a manual check).
Thanks for the feedback, it's very helpful. Something to keep in mind.. if you have any feeds that are particularly large, meaning > 100 items, that could be exacerbating things.
Long term, I'd like to move feed checking off the main thread, but for now, we'll need to work around the problem.
A related ehancement would be to allow the startup delay to be set as a preference and the delay between checks to be set. My experiment of changing INITIAL_CHECK to 1 hr has dealt with one problem that I have. I have various scripts and activities that use firefox to perform a few quick tasks. Doing a feed check serves no purpose and needlessly generates traffic.
The heuristic of waiting a while separates these short tasks from the longer sessions where it is appropriate to start checking feeds.
Making the DELAY and INITIAL_CHECK configurable preferences lets people adjust to match their own needs.
You know, I've always found autochecking incredibly annoying from a UX point of view. I'm trying to work through all my RSS feeds, and I'm halfway through, and then it starts autochecking and adding more new items....
On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 9:53 PM, rjhorniii [email protected] wrote:
A related ehancement would be to allow the startup delay to be set as a preference and the delay between checks to be set. My experiment of changing INITIAL_CHECK to 1 hr has dealt with one problem that I have. I have various scripts and activities that use firefox to perform a few quick tasks. Doing a feed check serves no purpose and needlessly generates traffic.
The heuristic of waiting a while separates these short tasks from the longer sessions where it is appropriate to start checking feeds.
Making the DELAY and INITIAL_CHECK configurable preferences lets people adjust to match their own needs.
— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/petea/sage/issues/100#issuecomment-181129664.
