[Firefox] Performance problems after upgrade to Ghostery 10

[GRadziejewski]

Help needed Ghostery 10 was released on 19th of August, 2024. Since then, we got reports about performance issues: increase of memory and (perhaps as a results) lagging behavior.

So far, we could not reproduce the behavior. If you are affected, these questions could narrow it down:

• What Firefox version are you using?
• Does it happen only if you have many tabs and windows open?
• Do specific website trigger the problem more often (e.g. videos)?
• Do you see any error messages in the extension ("about:debugging" look for Ghostery and click on "Inspect")
• (If nothing help) Does the problem go away if you uninstall Ghostery, restart the browser, and reinstall Ghostery?

If you have any insights, please feel free to comment on this issue. Thank you!

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Description
The Firefox browser is lagging after updating to V10. We got a few reports:

Since last upgrade/download browser started slowing down and lagging immediately

It got slow and became laggy so I tried to diagnose the problem and yesterday I found out that if I disable the Ghostery extension, all is well. When I enable it, the lag comes back. I'm currently on Firefox version 129.0.2 (64-bit).

Steps to Reproduce
Cannot reproduce

Expected results
The browser cannot run lagging.

Versions

GBE 10.4.1

[smalluban]

The issue might be related to a known bug caused by a corrupted IndexedDB instance for some Firefox users. We have found that by the pick of downloads of the updated adblocker engines. As we cannot store the updated engine, eventually, it is downloaded every time the background process starts (it's killed after 30s of idle).

The partial fix is here: #1838

One of the solutions to the problem might be a fresh installation of the extension. Most likely, the configuration and internal storage of the extension are reloaded, including the IndexedDB instance.

[philipp-classen]

Also relevant for this issue: #1849 (comment)

In a nutshell, persisting to IndexedDB will fail on Firefox if "Never remember history" mode is enabled. If you are affected by performance issues recently, please check if you have the setting enable (for more details, there is a screenshot in the linked comment).