Due to how web pages typically load secondary resources and due
to how HNTrieContainer instances are used in uBO, there is a
great likelihood that the result of a previous call to
HNTrieRef.matches() can be reused in a subsequent call.
This has been confirmed by instrumenting HNTrieRef.matches().
Since uBO uses distinct HNTrieContainer instances to either
match against the request or the origin hostnames, this
means a high likelihood of repeated calls to HNTrieRef.matches()
with the same hostname as argument, hence a performance gain
when caching the argument+result -- as despite that
HNTrie.matches() is fast, comparing two short strings is even
faster if this allows to skip HNTrie.matches() altogether.
Performance- and memory-related work. Three more classes have
been created to avoid regex-based filters internally.
Purpose is to enforce filters which have only one single
wildcard in their pattern, a common occurrence. The filter
pattern is split in two literal string segments.
Similar as above, with the added condition that the filter is
hostname-anchored (`||`). The "Wildcard2" variant is a further
specialization to enforce filters where the only wildcard
is immediately preceded by the `^` special character, again
a very common occurrence.
Using two literal string segments in lieu of regexes allows to
quickly detect a mismatch by just testing the first segment.
Additionally, this reduces memory footprint as regexes are
much more expensive memory-wise than plain strings.
These three new filter classes allow to replace the use of
5276 regex-based filters internally with plain string-based
filters.
Often-called isHnAnchored() has been further fine-tuned to
avoid as much work as possible. I have also observed that
using an arrow function for closure-purpose helps measurably
performance, as per built-in benchmark.
The purpose of using a custom base128 encoder is to
convert array buffers into strings, to allow a direct
string-to-array buffer conversion at load time:
string => array buffer
Whereas a JSON array would require an extra step:
JSON array as string => JS array => array buffer
Turns out that the current use of a custom base128 encoding
results in a significantly larger selfie storage usage when
converting array buffers into strings.
Speculation: possibly the browser convert the strings to
save into JSON strings internally. Since the custom base128
encoder is likely to cause the resulting string to contain
a lot of unprintable ASCII characters, these will need to
be escaped when converted to JSON -- escaped characters
occupy more space than non-escaped ones.
Using a sequence of base 64 numbers means only printable
will be present in the output string, hence no escaping
necessary. I have observed significant reduction in
storage usage for selfie purpose.
Related issue:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/528#issuecomment-484408622
Following STrie-related work in above issue, I noticed that a large
number of filters in EasyList were filters which only had to match
against the document origin. For instance, among just the top 10
most populous buckets, there were four such buckets with over
hundreds of entries each:
- bits: 72, token: "http", 146 entries
- bits: 72, token: "https", 139 entries
- bits: 88, token: "http", 122 entries
- bits: 88, token: "https", 118 entries
These filters in these buckets have to be matched against all
the network requests.
In order to leverage HNTrie for these filters[1], they are now handled
in a special way so as to ensure they all end up in a single HNTrie
(per bucket), which means that instead of scanning hundreds of entries
per URL, there is now a single scan per bucket per URL for these
apply-everywhere filters.
Now, any filter which fulfill ALL the following condition will be
processed in a special manner internally:
- Is of the form `|https://` or `|http://` or `*`; and
- Does have a `domain=` option; and
- Does not have a negated domain in its `domain=` option; and
- Does not have `csp=` option; and
- Does not have a `redirect=` option
If a filter does not fulfill ALL the conditions above, no change
in behavior.
A filter which matches ALL of the above will be processed in a special
manner:
- The `domain=` option will be decomposed so as to create as many
distinct filter as there is distinct value in the `domain=` option
- This also apply to the `badfilter` version of the filter, which
means it now become possible to `badfilter` only one of the
distinct filter without having to `badfilter` all of them.
- The logger will always report these special filters with only a
single hostname in the `domain=` option.
***
[1] HNTrie is currently WASM-ed on Firefox.
As a development tool for investigation purpose. To use, enter the
following at uBO's dev console:
µBlock.staticNetFilteringEngine.filterClassHistogram()
In the static network filtering engine, `google` token is too
generic and probably leads to too many false positives, beside
causing too large filter bucket.
Implement a plain string trie container class: STrieContainer.
Make use of STrieContainer where beneficial
Some filter buckets can grow quite large, and in such case
coalescing "trieable" filter classes into a single trie reduces
lookup performance and memory usage.
For instance, at time of commit, the filter bucket for the
`ad` keyword contains 919 entries[1].
Coalescing trieable filters of the same class into a single plain
string trie reduced the size of the bucket into 50 entries + two
tries which are scanned only once each whenever the bucket is
visited.
[1] Enter the following code at uBO's dev console:
µBlock.staticNetFilteringEngine.categories.get(0).get(µBlock.urlTokenizer.tokenHashFromString('ad'))
Refactor static network filtering engine code to make use of
ES6's syntactic sugar `class`.
Change first auto-update run from 7 to 5 minutes.
Related issue:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/416
The Chromium version of uBO has declared `unlimitedStorage` since the
extension was first published in 2014. Declaring this permission in
Firefox brings uBO inline with the Chromium version. I suspect some
reported errors could be caused by IndexedDB eviction due to the lack
of `unlimitedStorage` permission.
Additionally, a timeout has been added when uBO tries to access its
indexedDB storage. It's unclear whether this will help with the
mentioned related issue though, the root cause is still to be
identified.
Relocate workaround to the code responsible to compute filtering context, such
that the workaround will also be applied in other code paths, for example also
for webRequest.onHeadersReceived.
With the new PSL implementation, benchmarks do not show benefit
from caching the domain extracted from a hostname for later
reuse -- the caching seems to even add an overhead instead with
the new publicSuffixList implementation.
Default behavior is to fall back to an alternative backend
if the uBO-selected one is not available. However there will be
no fall back when the `cacheStorageAPI` is set to one specific
backend by the user.
The value of `suspendTabsUntilReady` was disregarded in Firefox and
uBO defaulted to always defer tab loading until it was ready.
This commit allows to disable the deferring of tab loading in
Firefox. The new valid values for `suspendTabsUntilReady` are:
- `unset`: leave it to the platform to pick the optimal
behavior (default)
- `no`: do no suspend tab loading at launch time
- `yes`: suspend tab loading at launch time
Related issue:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/409
By default `indexedDB` is used in Firefox for purpose of cache storage
backend.
This commit allows to force the use of `browser.storage.local` instead
as cache storage backend. For this to happen, set `cacheStorageAPI` to
`browser.storage.local` in advanced settings.
Additionally, should `indexedDB` not be available for whatever reason,
uBO will automatically fallback to `browser.storage.local`.
These filters are to be considered obsolete since they can't be
matched against network requests in the webRequest API.
They were probably meant to work when ABP was pre-webext, which
means they are quite probably obsolete and there is no longer
a point for uBO to conveniently translate them into CSP directives.
This removes the derivation of FilterOrigin flavors from
FilterOrigin itself and simplify code paths. FilterOrigin
flavors are small specialized classes, no need to
overcomplicate with derivation.
Specifically, this removes an indirect call to reach the
match() method.
As seen at:
https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html
The requests.json.gz file can be downloaded from:
https://cdn.cliqz.com/adblocking/requests_top500.json.gz
Copy the file into ./tmp/requests.json.gz
If the file is present when you build uBO using `make-[target].sh` from
the shell, the resulting package will contain `./assets/requests.json`,
which will be looked-up by the method below to launch a benchmark
session.
From uBO's dev console, launch the benchmark:
µBlock.staticNetFilteringEngine.benchmark();
The usual browser dev tools can be used to obtain useful profiling
data, i.e. start the profiler, call the benchmark method from the
console, then stop the profiler when it completes.
Keep in mind that the measurements at the blog post above where obtained
with ONLY EasyList. The CPU reportedly used was:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-6600U+%40+2.60GHz&id=2608
Rename ./tmp/requests.json.gz to something else if you no longer want
./assets/requests.json in the build.
The motivation is to address the higher peak memory usage at launch
time with 3rd-gen HNTrie when a selfie was present.
The selfie generation prior to this change was to collect all
filtering data into a single data structure, and then to serialize
that whole structure at once into storage (using JSON.stringify).
However, HNTrie serialization requires that a large UintArray32 be
converted into a plain JS array, which itslef would be indirectly
converted into a JSON string. This was the main reason why peak
memory usage would be higher at launch from selfie, since the JSON
string would need to be wholly unserialized into JS objects, which
themselves would need to be converted into more specialized data
structures (like that Uint32Array one).
The solution to lower peak memory usage at launch is to refactor
selfie generation to allow a more piecemeal approach: each filtering
component is given the ability to serialize itself rather than to be
forced to be embedded in the master selfie. With this approach, the
HNTrie buffer can now serialize to its own storage by converting the
buffer data directly into a string which can be directly sent to
storage. This avoiding expensive intermediate steps such as
converting into a JS array and then to a JSON string.
As part of the refactoring, there was also opportunistic code
upgrade to ES6 and Promise (eventually all of uBO's code will be
proper ES6).
Additionally, the polyfill to bring getBytesInUse() to Firefox has
been revisited to replace the rather expensive previous
implementation with an implementation with virtually no overhead.
The Promise chain was not properly designed for WASM module
loading. This became apparent when removing WASM modules
from Opera build[1].
The problem was that errors thrown by fetch() -- used to
load WASM modules -- were not properly handled.
[1] Opera refuses updating uBO if there are unrecognized file
types in the package, and `.wasm`/`.wat` files are not
recognized by Opera uploader.
Related issue:
- https://github.com/NanoAdblocker/NanoCore/issues/239
The erroneous behavior was to compute the URL of a sublist as
relative to the URL of the root list, which may differ from the
URL of a parent list.
Those spurious disconnections have been observed to occur at
uBO's launch time.
Related issue:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/403
I have observed that this fixes an issue observed on Firefox 64
(current stable).
The reported Waterfox issue *may* be fixed as a result. If not,
the issue he still considered fixed as Waterfox is not
officially supported.
Related issue:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/399
The advanced setting `cacheStorageAPI` has been added to allow
a user to force the use of IndexedDB as cache storage. Set to
`IndexedDB` to force use of IndexedDB. Default to `unset`.
Performance-related work: the logger data has been decoupled
from the DOM -- inspired from CodeMirror's way of efficiently
handling large amout of text data.
This decoupling now makes the logger highly efficient CPU- and
memory-wise, and open the way to more possibilities.
Ability to configure some aspect of the logger behavior and
visuals:
- The hard-coded limit of 5000 entries has been
removed and is now replaced with a variety of
user-configurable settings to enforce the discarding of
logger entries.
- Some columns in the logger output can now be hidden.
The filter list look-up feature has been merged into the
existing overlay dialog used to create URL rules or static
filters, as an entry in a new "Details" pane.
Other issues addressed during refactoring:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/280
- https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/1999
The minimum version supported on Firefox has been bumped
up to 55.0.
Related issues:
- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/372
- https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/93
A new advanced settings has been added: `autoCommentFilterTemplate`.
Default value is `{{date}} {{origin}}`.
Placeholders are identified by `{{...}}`. There are currently
only three placeholders supported:
- `{{date}}`: will be replaced with current date
- `{{time}}`: will be replaced with current time
- `{{origin}}`: will be replaced with site information on which
the filter(s) was created
If no placeholder is found in `autoCommentFilterTemplate`, this
will disable auto-commenting. So one can use `-` to disable
auto-commenting.
Additionally, if auto-commenting is enabled, uBO will not emit a
comment if an emitted comment would be a duplicate of the last
one found in the user filter list.
The DOM surveyor will now use time-based logic to spread its work
over time. This allows the surveying to better scale down on
slower devices.
Additionally, the DOM surveyor code has been reworked to lower as
much as possible memory churning when collating nodes to survey.
This rework has been motivated after profiling the "monstrous DOM"
seen in the following page:
<https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/iter/trait.Iterator.html>
The idea is that making the DOM surveyor efficient on such
"monstrous DOM" case should make it efficient everywhere in
practice.
- Avoid concatenating with empty array: though the concatenated
array is empty, this still forces the creation of a whole new
array as per semantic of Array.prototype.concat().
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/concat>
- Do not convert arrays to strings when sending data to
main process in surveyPhase1(): I no longer see any benefit
doing so in profiling data (if I recall properly this was
benefiting Firefox, but I can't remember for sure anymore why
I chose to do so back then).
Hopefully this will fix the issue seen on Firefox for Android: for
some reasons, the popup panel's default size is now more zoomed
out than it used to be in latest stable release.
Additionally, I fixed the syntactically incorrect instances of
:before and :after.
Related issue:
- https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/3683
This commit further increases uBO's procedural cosmetic filters
Adguard's cosmetic filter syntax -- specifically those procedural
cosmetic filters where plain CSS selectors appeared following
a procedural oeprator (this was rejected as invalid by uBO).
Also, experimental support for `:watch-attrs` procedural
operator, as discussed in <https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/341#issuecomment-449765525>.
Support may be dropped before next release depending on whether
a better solution is suggested.
Additionally, the usual opportunistic refactoring toward ES6
syntax.
- Make FA icons non-selectable, because of spurious selection
on Firefox for Android when merely tapping an icon
- Disable spellchecking in the static network filter editor
in the logger
Related issue:
- https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/3708
This was brought into the issue above but I ended up forgotting
about it after I focused mostly on the second issue brought up
in there.
Raymond Hill