Faster Checking from the Toolbar
LiveClick will soon introduce a new toolbar button, with which you can quickly check for new Live Bookmark items and access other common LiveClick options. But that’s just part of the reason why Live Bookmarks will be faster with the next LiveClick.
Toolbar Button
Click the LiveClick toolbar button to check for new items.
Toolbar Button Menu
Click the dropdown to open a menu of common LiveClick commands and options.
One of the biggest complaints since Firefox 3’s release concerned the browser’s over-aggressive checking for new Live Bookmark items. The process often locked up the browser and utilized too much of the CPU. The Firefox developers were aware of this and made smart changes to Firefox 3.5 to mitigate the problem, but the core issue still exists.
Naturally, LiveClick users have been greatly affected by this, especially those who rely on “Check for new items now” (or Ctrl+Shift+L). I remain hopeful that a solution will come from the Firefox team, but LiveClick’s new toolbar button presented a good opportunity for me to investigate the problem further. If I’m going to introduce a new feature, I don’t want its functionality to be hampered by Firefox’s limitations.
As I understand it, when it’s time to check for new items, Firefox 1) fetches the feed, 2) destroys the existing items of a Live Bookmark, and 3) re-populates the Live Bookmark with the feed’s entries.
What slows the browser down are those last two steps, which require heavy disk access. There’s a significant amount of (mostly necessary) overhead involved, too, as a handful of associated annotations have to be deleted and then re-added, which ultimately leads to a series of related notifications being sent and observers reacting. Boring, technical details, I know, but the takeaway here is that a lot of activity occurs in the background, not just for each Live Bookmark, but for each Live Bookmark item. It shouldn’t be hard to understand that these quickly add up and that the system can be overwhelmed by all this happening mostly at the same time.
The key, then, is to avoid those last two steps whenever possible. The next version of LiveClick does this by inserting another step after fetching the feed. Call it 1b) or Check to see if the feed contains new items. Only when there are new items does LiveClick move on to steps 2 and 3. Firefox currently proceeds to destroy and re-populate the Live Bookmark, regardless of whether or not it needs to.
I’m pleased to say that this little optimization noticeably improves Firefox’s performance when checking for new items, and will be especially helpful to those who check frequently or those whose feeds aren’t updated often.
Note that this does not replace the automatic process by which Firefox currently checks Live Bookmarks. It can only be triggered manually, via the new toolbar button, the Bookmarks > Live Bookmarks > Check for new items now command, or Ctrl+Shift+L.
More LiveClick features and optimizations to come!
Posted on Apr 03 2010 at 03:06 PM
Next entry: LiveClick 0.3.7.0
Previous entry: LiveClick 0.3.6.0
Thanks for the comments, p3ngwin. I’ve had limited contact with the Firefox devs and it’s mostly been through bugzilla. Their roadmap for Live Bookmarks is far different than mine. They’re planning new (better) ways to implement the entire system; I’m trying to get the existing one to work, well, the way I want it to work. Let me know where you post your Live Bookmark thoughts. I’ll add my observations if they’re of any help.
LiveClick stopped working on either the 4/16 or the 4/17 nightly. I haven’t explored why yet. Obviously we’re not officially supporting 3.7 at this time, but I am developing LiveClick with future Firefox versions in mind.
And a quick update on the checker. I’ve made a lot of progress on this and found several ways to reduce bandwidth and CPU cycles (which honestly affected only LiveClick). I’ll add a post on some of the new features coming up soon. Because the changes are pretty major, I expect to do some intensive beta testing. Hope I can count on you and your 160 feeds to help. 
Thanks again!
Posted by protejohnny on 04/23 at 11:33 AM
glad to hear from you.
i’ll certainly bounce feedback between you and bugzilla.
as for your next LiveClick, i’d be happy to stress-test it whenever you like, feel free to contact me anytime
thanks,
p3ngwin
Posted by p3ngwin on 04/23 at 01:30 PM
thank god someone is doing something about the ridiculous method of updating feeds!
i have 160 RSS feeds on my toolbar, organised in folder and all set to update every 10 minutes. yes 160 feeds updating every 10 mins !
currently firefox locks up under the heavy I/O for a fews seconds, every few seconds. this is on a 3.2Ghz quad-core CPU, 6 gigs RAM 7200RPM hard drive.
i put up with it because amazingly my setup with all my 38 other extentions is still the best balance for me. but it’s such a pain to have the interface lock-up frequently.
i’ll take your observations about the redundant steps Firefox makes to destroy & repopulate the same content and post it to Mozilla’s Trunk forums where i’m active in nightlies and bugzilla.
have you been in contact at all with the dev’s about this issue? it’s very important as they are are focusing on balancing better “main thread” processing and user interaction experience performance right now.
as for your extention, i’ve been loving it as one of my “can’t do without” extentions for what seems like a few yeas now. currently it seems to break the toolbars on recent nightlies (i’m looking into a regression range) and look forward to your continued development of this great addon.
thanks, and keep up the good work.
Posted by p3ngwin on 04/17 at 01:41 PM