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Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

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Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#151

Post by 1ris »

wongarsu wrote: post #76
azinman2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm misreading things but it looks like it's been constantly getting worse since 2012?

They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.

Hardware does not get exponetially better. Maybe it did in 90ties and 00ers. Right now hardwardware gets slimmer, less power consuming and cheaper. But not better. My 12 year old (then mid-end gaming pc) is pretty much exactly as fast as my current, 2(?) year old office machine. (x264 and other mulit-threaed cpu benchbmarks) But it costs a fraction and uses next to no energy.

/edit: Yes this is wrong. I made a mistake. My "gaming" desktop is "only" 8 years old. It has a 4 core AMD processor. It's on par with current atoms.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#152

Post by bzbarsky »

mstange wrote: post #139
bzbarsky wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last link looks about the same to me in Chrome dev and Firefox nightly, for what it's worth.

It's 5-10 fps in Firefox Nightly for me, and 50-60 fps in Chrome Canary, on OS X.

OK. They're both about 20fps or so for me (at least eyeballing it).

Mind filing the bug, since you can reproduce and profile?

Edit: mstange did in fact file one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1300848

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#153

Post by aluhut »

wvenable wrote: post #130
nl wrote: post #7

I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…

I've been a long time Firefox user (due to multi-row tab extension -- can't live without it). I can easily have 120 tabs open when doing research. Firefox has always been relatively performant even with that huge number of tabs visible and I almost never have to close it. However, something recently has changed. Firefox will work fine and then something will cause it use a large amount of CPU that it doesn't let go o…

> I've been a long time Firefox user (due to multi-row tab extension -- can't live without it).

Which one do you use? There are several.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#154

Post by wongarsu »

antisthenes wrote: post #131
wongarsu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.

Not only is this false, but completely ignores troves of older hardware existing in people's homes that has to run browsers just as well. The average consumer hardware improves at nowhere near exponential rate (although I guess it depends on the timescale and your willingness to fudge the graph to sparse data points).

>completely ignores troves of older hardware existing in people's homes that has to run browsers just as well.

The performance has gotten worse for users of a computer from 2006, but it has improved for users of ten-year old computers (since a ten-year old computer in 2012 would have been from 2002). If you assume that a computer is less likely to be used the older it gets (and that this rate is roughly stable), then I am not ignoring older hardware at all.

>although I guess it depends on the timescale and your willingness to fudge the graph to sparse data points

thus is the nature of all real-live long-term trends. If you pick a sufficiently small timeframe, they never work.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#155

Post by rwmj »

NoGravitas wrote: post #73
tomp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevertheless, I prefer Chrome's approach. I can just open the process explorer and kill a few of the most memory hungry tabs/tab groups; with Firefox, there's no other solution than killing the whole browser. Can't wait for this fix!

I believe in current Firefox you could kill the memory-hungry tabs, then go to about:memory and force a GC. Or restart and let your tabs stay open but not loaded until you use them. Not that either of these is super-convenient.

In Firefox 47 (or 48?) you can now do: about:performance which displays/kills the CPU hungry tabs directly.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#156

Post by akerro »

mintplant wrote: post #97
akerro wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whole browser freezez for me on any amazon page. Just when it starts rendering it freezes everything inside Firefox window for a few seconds. It's so annoying that I'm considering dropping Firefox after over a decade for Opera or Brave browser.

What addons do you have installed, and what OS are you using?

ArchLinux 64 https://i.imgur.com/sDqs24a.png

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#158

Post by Animats »

At last, you'll be able to view other pages while Facebook's Javascript is in an infinite loop.

With thousands of MIPS and a gigabyte of memory on the job, it had better be responsive. It's pathetic how much compute power it takes to run a browser. Even when the pages aren't doing anything interesting. It's not like they're running a 3D game or something.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#159

Post by dTal »

1ris wrote: post #151
wongarsu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.

Hardware does not get exponetially better. Maybe it did in 90ties and 00ers. Right now hardwardware gets slimmer, less power consuming and cheaper. But not better. My 12 year old (then mid-end gaming pc) is pretty much exactly as fast as my current, 2(?) year old office machine. (x264 and other mulit-threaed cpu benchbmarks) But it costs a fraction and uses next to no energy. /edit: Yes this is wrong. I made a mistak…

Love the redundancy of "90ties", but what's the etymology of "00ers"?

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#160

Post by Sylos »

sp332 wrote: post #112
danblick wrote: post #6

Does anybody know more about how Mozilla manages experiments? I'd always assumed that all users downloaded an identical binary and got the same behavior. How do they assign 10% of their users to an experimental group? Is it possible that two users will see different functionality when they are both using the same OS and release, say Firefox from the latest version of Ubuntu?

Certain features are rolled out with Test Pilot https://wiki.mozilla.org/Test_Pilot but that doesn't seem to include the e10s testing.

Yeah, Test Pilot is more for features where Mozilla wants to experiment and see, if people even like the feature in general, not so much for bug-testing.

With e10s, it was clear that it would be included in Firefox, so they just tested it by pushing it through the normal chain of Nightly->Developer Edition->Beta->Stable.

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