[HTTPS-Everywhere] Help needed: Settings window and memory / CPU profiling

[Jacob Hoffman-Andrews]

Hi all,

There are two important improvements I'd like to get into HTTPS
Everywhere soon, but I have been too swamped with Let's Encrypt work to
get them done. These would be great volunteer projects:

    https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/issues/1771
    Settings window freezes Firefox for a long time / sometimes crashes it.

My preferred fix for this is to simply remove the settings window. It
shows all the rulesets at once, which is somewhat meaningless when we
have 15k+ rulesets. That's also redundant with the HTTPS Everywhere
Atlas. The one setting from that window that we probably want to keep is
"Reset to Defaults," which should be moved into the primary window
anyhow. The settings window is accessible through "Enable / Disable
Rules" in the HTTPS Everywhere icon menu, *and* by clicking "Settings"
from the Firefox Extensions page, so we'd have to pull it out in both
places.

The alternative is to modify the settings page so that it doesn't show
any rulesets when it first opens, and then only loads rulesets in
response to a query. This is more complicated to write, and there are
probably still some queries that will load so many rulesets they will
freeze the browser.

    https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/issues/1775
    HTTPS Everywhere uses too much memory

Beyond the settings window problem, HTTPS Everywhere just consumes too
much memory. We should approach this in a disciplined way: Pick a set of
100 sites and run a memory profile of HTTPS Everywhere as it loads them,
then attack the largest sources of memory use first. We should probably
also do CPU profiling, as there are big wins to be had there. This is an
issue across both Firefox and Chrome, but I think Firefox has a bigger
problem, since Nick Semenkovich has already done a lot of great work on
speeding up the Chrome extension. Unfortunately I don't have any
experience profiling Firefox extensions, so we need someone who either
has that experience or wants to put in the time to learn it.

Thanks,
Jacob
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.eff.org/pipermail/https-everywhere/attachments/20150617/f80a5090/attachment.html>