On Thu, 11 Aug 2022 at 15:13, Paul Zühlcke <[email protected]> wrote:

> This is awesome! Thanks for working on it.
> What happens if the disk cache clearing hasn't finished when user starts
> Firefox again? Will they still be able to use the cache?
>

Good question. The cache folder is renamed, prior to deletion, so we can be
sure the background task has exclusive access to it. A new instance would
start with a completely new cache folder, even if the background task
hasn't finished deleting the old one yet.

PS. Sorry for forgetting the subject in my previous email 🙂


> On Thu, 11 Aug 2022 at 14:50, Valentin Gosu <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> As Bug 1705676 - Investigate purging HTTP disk cache using
>> backgroundtasks (out-of-process)
>> <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1705676> is getting closer
>> to landing, I wanted to give everyone a heads-up about this change and the
>> reasoning behind it.
>>
>> We have a non-default setting in the History settings preferences panel
>> where you may choose to "Clear History when Firefox closes" - which sets
>> the privacy.sanitize.sanitizeOnShutdown pref. If the Cache checkbox is also
>> checked that sets the privacy.clearOnShutdown.cache pref to true.
>> When both of these prefs are true CacheObserver::ClearCacheOnShutdown()
>> will return true, which will cause Firefox to clear the HTTP disk cache
>> during shutdown. This will block shutdown for however long this takes. If
>> the user has a slow disk, or the user is on Windows and something is
>> blocking the deletion of those files, this will trigger a shutdown hang
>> making Firefox crash. This also leads to a bad user experience as trying to
>> start Firefox again during this time will show the "Firefox is already
>> running message". Eventually a crash dump is produced. Bug 1356853 and bug
>> 1682899 are caused by this specific issue.
>>
>> In order to avoid these shutdown hangs, we have introduced a new
>> mechanism that uses background tasks
>> <https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/backgroundtasks/index.html>
>> to delegate the deletion of the cache to a separate process that may
>> outlive Firefox. Even if this process is unexpectedly killed (as may happen
>> during shutdown), we spawn it again after Firefox starts up to clean up any
>> directories that may be left.
>>
>> *The plan is to enable this on Windows Nightly in the next few days to
>> evaluate if this does indeed work as expected. Assuming it doesn't cause
>> any issues, we plan to ship it to beta and release at a later date.*
>>
>> Please let me know if you have any concerns. Many thanks to Nick
>> Alexander who supported this effort with a lot of reviews and improvements
>> to backgroundtasks.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Valentin
>>
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>>
>

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