Kit, "this is HUGE".

We know how long you've been working on this so congratulations for getting
this out the door!

--
Alex Davis // Mountain View
Product Manager // FxA & Sync
(415) 769-9247
IRC & Slack: adavis

On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 11:45 AM, Nicholas Alexander <[email protected]
> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 9:28 AM, Kit Cambridge <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Tomorrow's Nightly will include some improvements to how we track
>> bookmark changes for syncing [1]. I wanted to take some time to
>> summarize them in this email.
>>
>> Previously, Sync listened for observer notifications from Places [2],
>> recorded the changes in memory, and periodically flushed them to disk.
>> This caused Sync to occasionally miss changes at startup or during a
>> sync, and lose changes from interrupted syncs.
>>
>> The fix moves the change tracking logic into Places. Instead of using
>> observers, the new bookmarks tracker pulls the set of changed
>> bookmarks directly from the database. A new "change counter" column
>> increments every time a bookmark is modified in a way that should
>> trigger a sync, and decrements once the bookmark has been successfully
>> uploaded to the server. The counter is updated in a transaction,
>> ensuring we don't lose changes at startup or shutdown. This design
>> also avoids missing changes during a sync.
>>
>> We think these lost changes are responsible for a large portion of
>> corrupt server bookmark trees. This corruption can spread to other
>> devices, and blocks us from enabling bidirectional syncing on iOS.
>> We've developed a two-pronged mitigation strategy: prevent Sync from
>> corrupting the server in the first place, and repair existing
>> corruption by uploading missing bookmarks. The tracker improvements
>> are a form of prevention, and repair is currently in the works [3].
>>
>> If you're using Sync, I encourage you to install the About Sync add-on
>> [4], and validate your bookmarks [5]. We want to make sure the new
>> tracker doesn't introduce new errors. If you've been using Sync for a
>> while, it's likely you'll already have some validation errors. We want
>> to know about these, too, so that we can prioritize our repair
>> efforts. Please file new bugs in the "Firefox :: Sync" component on
>> Bugzilla, or reply to this thread.
>>
>> Special thanks to Marco Bonardo, Mark Hammond, Richard Newman, and
>> Thom Chiovoloni for all their insightful feedback and reviews!
>>
>
> This is a really big deal.  Great work rebuilding one of the cruftiest
> parts of Desktop Sync.  This is how we get to a better world!
>
> Huge ups to the reviewers, too -- this would be hard to write, let alone
> swap in and juggle all the interactions...
>
> Nick
>
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