According to a new report, Firefox has a serious telemetry problem, and Android phones are affected by it. The issue is with ‘Glean’, Mozilla’s “product analytics & telemetry solution”. It’s expected to provide a “consistent experience and behavior” across the company’s products.
Firefox seemingly has a considerable telemetry problem, and Android phones are affected by it
Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case. A rather serious issue was pointed out over at ‘Bugzilla’. It is said that every update to a Glean telemetry metric comes with a “large CPU time cost and a large disk write”.
It is said this happens for two reasons. The first one is because telemetry metric updates aren’t batched on Android. Each update results in a database write to the Glean database.
The other reason is because the Glean database uses ‘rkv’ in ‘safe’ mode. It is said that no matter how small the update is, on every update, the entire database is serialized to disk.
Why is that a problem? Well, because phones are “getting hammered with writes on all occasions: page load, scrolling, video playback, startup”. It is also pointed out that database serialization allocates and then frees a lot of memory. That, in turn, causes “contention of the malloc lock and slows down allocation in other threads”.
This problem puts a considerable strain on the CPU, storage & decreases battery life
All of this puts a considerable strain on the CPU and reduces battery life too. Excessive writes are also not great for phones and could have a negative impact on smartphone longevity.
Considering that the issue is known now, let’s hope that Mozilla will get on it, and fix this up as soon as possible. You can read more about the issue here, with more information provided in a separate thread too.
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