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Firefox is slow - troubleshooting

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Re: Firefox is slow - troubleshooting

#11

Post by thaumaturgy »

glenjamin wrote: post #6
riledhel wrote: post #2

"Firefox may hang if left open for long periods of time. To fix the issue, restart Firefox." Oh my God...

This is more-or-less exactly what you do with Chrome all the time. Because each tab is a separate process, you're implictly closing and opening it for each new tab.

I pointed this out on a Reddit thread quite a while back, started by some Firefox devs. Or maybe it was Opera devs. Anyway, I was surprised by the response: neither the devs, nor other commenters in the thread, saw the benefit to making every tab its own process.

Re: Firefox is slow - troubleshooting

#12

Post by rpearl »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #11
glenjamin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more-or-less exactly what you do with Chrome all the time. Because each tab is a separate process, you're implictly closing and opening it for each new tab.

I pointed this out on a Reddit thread quite a while back, started by some Firefox devs. Or maybe it was Opera devs. Anyway, I was surprised by the response: neither the devs, nor other commenters in the thread, saw the benefit to making every tab its own process.

IPC is very expensive.

Furthermore, firefox 4 does have some separate processes (not per tab). Note that chrome's default is not per-tab either.

Re: Firefox is slow - troubleshooting

#13

Post by nhebb »

Tip: If Firefox is slow / consuming too much memory, start a private browsing session then close the browser. When you restart it, all the tabs will re-open to the previous pages, and the memory footprint is usually smaller.

Re: Firefox is slow - troubleshooting

#14

Post by AlisdairO »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #10
barrkel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I regularly ran Firefox 3.6 (I'm on v4 now) for weeks at a time, and never had such issues. I'd guess it's an extension or plugin you had installed. My biggest problem with Firefox (v4 only) is shutting it down takes ages as it iterates through every file in the cache, which is encrypted on my machine. I limited my cache size to 50MB, which seems to have limited the pause times to something reasonable. I cannot stand…

I do have a few extensions installed & enabled -- AdBlock Plus, Firebug, Greasemonkey (rarely used, I should just uninstall it), Flashblock, and YSlow. But, I've seen similar behavior on at least one other system, and the only extension we had in common there was AdBlock Plus. The behavior also predates Greasemonkey. The other system is newer, and the slowdown there is less pronounced (though still noticeable), which…

I have no idea, all I know is that when I can't do it it feels like something is deeply wrong :-)

Re: Firefox is slow - troubleshooting

#15

Post by riledhel »

paul9290 wrote: post #5
riledhel wrote: post #2

"Firefox may hang if left open for long periods of time. To fix the issue, restart Firefox." Oh my God...

To prevent this from happening don't use flash with Firefox or really any browser! It can handle one or two instances of flash running at the same time but anymore watch out .. FlashCrash!

With the latest version of Chrome and Firefox, you can just kill the plugin container and the system/browser gets snappy again in a sec.

Re: Firefox is slow - troubleshooting

#16

Post by grahamedgecombe »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #9
perlgeek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also an "AddBlock Plus" for Chrome, and a short test shows it that works decently, but I don't know if the quality is the same. Maybe worth a try?

Chrome's ad blocker grabs items after they've downloaded and (briefly) displayed on the page, and then hides them. Also, Chrome is still not available for my aging PPC.

I don't think it does that any more in recent versions of Chrome. There is an 'onbeforeload' event which can block the ads before they start loading.

Re: Firefox is slow - troubleshooting

#17

Post by lordgilman »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #9
perlgeek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also an "AddBlock Plus" for Chrome, and a short test shows it that works decently, but I don't know if the quality is the same. Maybe worth a try?

Chrome's ad blocker grabs items after they've downloaded and (briefly) displayed on the page, and then hides them. Also, Chrome is still not available for my aging PPC.

FYI, if you're still using 3.6 (as mentioned in an earlier post) there is a fork of firefox 4 for PPC here http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/ .

Re: Firefox is slow - troubleshooting

#18

Post by thaumaturgy »

rpearl wrote: post #12
thaumaturgy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pointed this out on a Reddit thread quite a while back, started by some Firefox devs. Or maybe it was Opera devs. Anyway, I was surprised by the response: neither the devs, nor other commenters in the thread, saw the benefit to making every tab its own process.

IPC is very expensive. Furthermore, firefox 4 does have some separate processes (not per tab). Note that chrome's default is not per-tab either.

> IPC is very expensive.

I have trouble taking that at face-value; Linux seems to do OK with it and, for a while, there was a little-bitty web browser for Macs called Stainless (http://stainlessapp.com/) that did one-process-per-tab, and it seemed quite performant. Better, in fact, than all other browsers at the time. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated in about a year now...

> Note that chrome's default is not per-tab either.

Oh yeah, somebody pointed that out to me back on that Reddit thread, too. I forgot. Still, I really think it should be, and that it should be considered standard practice for all browsers.

A while back, my frustrations with browsers resulted in a quickie project that I called "Crash My Browser" (still up at http://crashmybrowser.com/). I haven't tested it with recent browsers, but, once upon a time, at least one of the tests on that page could completely cripple not just that page's tab, but the entire browser, for most browsers. Since nobody seemed to get why that was a really stupid design flaw, I figured a demonstration was in order.

Re: Firefox is slow - troubleshooting

#19

Post by thristian »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #11
glenjamin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more-or-less exactly what you do with Chrome all the time. Because each tab is a separate process, you're implictly closing and opening it for each new tab.

I pointed this out on a Reddit thread quite a while back, started by some Firefox devs. Or maybe it was Opera devs. Anyway, I was surprised by the response: neither the devs, nor other commenters in the thread, saw the benefit to making every tab its own process.

That surprises me too, since Mozilla has been working on retrofitting their codebase to allow running web-content in a separate process for some time now:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

If that page is to be trusted, Firefox on Android already does it.

Re: Firefox is slow - troubleshooting

#20

Post by rikthevik »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #11
glenjamin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more-or-less exactly what you do with Chrome all the time. Because each tab is a separate process, you're implictly closing and opening it for each new tab.

I pointed this out on a Reddit thread quite a while back, started by some Firefox devs. Or maybe it was Opera devs. Anyway, I was surprised by the response: neither the devs, nor other commenters in the thread, saw the benefit to making every tab its own process.

Well, from a security perspective, it can make the boundaries between tabs a lot more concrete.
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