MetaMask performance got worse in v8

[wjmelements]

Reopening #8572 for version 8.0.4

Whether connecting, opening the popup, or sending a transaction, I am met by a blank page that must be watched the whole time or all progress will be lost.

From clicking the fox icon, it takes 6 seconds before the blank white window appears and 19 seconds before I can see an account.

[rekmarks]

@wjmelements thank you for alerting us to this.

@brad-decker, are there any low-hanging fruits in the UI that could help with this, like buffering the transaction list?

[wjmelements]

Is there something I can do to help you profile the delay?

[bunsen2]

Same here. New version is running at least 10x slower than the old version.

[Gudahtt]

@wjmelements To start, we'll need to reproduce this delay you're experiencing. Are you only experiencing this when using an account with >1000 transactions, as with #8572? Which browser are you using?

[wjmelements]

@Gudahtt Unlike #8572 I also experience a delay when I have an unused account selected, but it could still be relevant that I have two accounts with over 2000 transactions and one with over 5000.

I am using Chrome.

[wjmelements]

I profiled the background process during the delay using the chrome devtools, but it looks like minified garbage. Might still be helpful.

[wjmelements]

This looks relevant; lots of GC, with write() taking the most time

[danfinlay]

@wjmelements A few questions:

• Are these thousands of txs incoming, or are outgoing also listed?
• To clarify, this is only on v8, even though you opened the issue before that was live? (I assume you were living off develop?)

I ask because we have long limited the length of the outgoing history, so either this is a bug and we're showing more than 40 or this is related to how v8 now shows incoming txs and does not impose that limit.

Would we solve this issue if we truncated the incoming tx list for now, until we allow a more incremental loading of tx history?

[ElderOrb]

I'm experiencing this issue too

[whymarrh]

@ElderOrb would you be able to share a rough count of how many transactions you have across your accounts?

[whymarrh]

@danfinlay tx performance was bad in 7.x as well (i.e. #8572) and v8 has possibly made it worse. I don't believe this is related to the tx state history, but I'll look at that.

@wjmelements thanks for re-opening this, I'm looking into it now.

[bunsen2]

It's running smoothly after I deleted the extension and re-installed it

[wjmelements]

@wjmelements A few questions:

• Are these thousands of txs incoming, or are outgoing also listed?

Outgoing

• To clarify, this is only on v8, even though you opened the issue before that was live? (I assume you were living off develop?)

The prior issue was for v7.

[whymarrh]

I can confirm that this is a severe performance problem. The "good" news is that this isn't significantly worse in v8—the slowness here is a result of the serializing/deserializing of state between MetaMask's background (persistent) and UI processes, and this hasn't changed recently.

I have a stopgap fix (#9010) that will limit the number of transactions exposed to the UI (more or less). This does indeed increase the responsiveness of the application quite drastically. 2.5k-3k transactions can take upwards of 4.5 seconds to move around internally, and with #9010 that is down to 90ms for de/serialization in some tests.

Before vs. after profile screenshots

The stopgap fix is just that. The bad news is that we don't have a good short-term fix. A proper fix for this will involve reworking how our background and UI contexts communicate, which is definitely on our radar, but isn't something we've got planned for a patch release.

It's running smoothly after I deleted the extension and re-installed it

A very immediate workaround is, yes, to restore from a seed phrase, which will reset the installation's tracked transactions. This isn't ideal, obviously, but is the only option until 8.0.5 is published.

[xmaysonnave]

Metamask v8.0.4, debian buster, I5-7300U, 16GB, NVME

Here some informations how slow could be the UI.

I started to use Metamask encryption.

1 - Encryption performed with eth-sig-util and the public encryption key retrieved from Metamask
The sample is a 3MB sample (base64)

sigUtil.encrypt(
  currentPublicKey,
  { data: text },
  'x25519-xsalsa20-poly1305'
)

Here is my output:
Ethereum Encrypt: 152ms, In: 2524460, Out: 3366129, Ratio: 133%

2 - Decryption occurs in Metamask
Metamask is unlocked and the DApp has already the permission to access Metamask
Here is my output:
Ethereum Decrypt: 24435ms, In: 3366157, Out: 2524480, Ratio: 74%
In some situation, Metamask when locked and no permission the UI could take up to 50s.

var tStart = new Date();
var decryptedText = await provider.request({ method: "eth_decrypt", params: [text, accounts[0]] })
if (decryptedText !== undefined || decryptedText !== null) {
  var tStop = new Date()-tStart;
  var ratio = Math.floor(decryptedText.length*100/text.length);
  console.log(`Ethereum Decrypt: ${tStop}ms, In: ${text.length}, Out: ${decryptedText.length}, Ratio: ${ratio}%`);
}

3 - Decryption when tested with only eth-sig-util and the appropriate private key.
It takes roughly 300ms to decrypt the content.

Thanks

[Gudahtt]

The stopgap measure implemented in #9010 has hopefully worked well as a temporary solution, but I'm going to leave this open for now until we've at least documented in GitHub what our longer-term solution for this will be. In the meantime I'll mark this as "blocked", since further work is blocked on these yet-to-be-specified improvements to our background <=> UI communication.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity in the last 90 days. It will be closed in 45 days if there is no further activity. The MetaMask team intends on reviewing this issue before close, and removing the stale label if it is still a bug. We welcome new comments on this issue. We do not intend on closing issues if they report bugs that are still reproducible. Thank you for your contributions.

[github-actions]

This issue was closed because there has been no follow up activity in the last 45 days. If you feel this was closed in error, please reopen and provide evidence on the latest release of the extension. Thank you for your contributions.