Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser

Not to discount the work that Mozilla has been doing, but it seems like the "improvement" they added is actually just a workaround for distros that configure filesystems incorrectly.

That is, his machine is configured to use an obsolete filesystem (ext3) in a mode with significant performance problems (data=ordered).

There are numerous ways that a machine can be mis-configured such that it suffers from poor performance. It would be better if Firefox detected these and warned about them, rather than just silently working around the broken-ness.

Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser

#5

Post by redmethod » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 6:41 PM UTC

Even with fixes, most people seem to be switching to Chrome. It's hard to beat Google's integration

Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser

#6

Post by talmand » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 6:43 PM UTC

jmillikin wrote: post #4

Not to discount the work that Mozilla has been doing, but it seems like the "improvement" they added is actually just a workaround for distros that configure filesystems incorrectly. That is, his machine is configured to use an obsolete filesystem (ext3) in a mode with significant performance problems (data=ordered). There are numerous ways that a machine can be mis-configured such that it suffers from poor performan…

But this is a common theme with people who label software as bad. It's possible the problem is something other than the software being used, but since they only see the problem while using said software then obviously the problem is the software itself.

Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser

#7

Post by CrLf » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 6:47 PM UTC

jmillikin wrote: post #4

Not to discount the work that Mozilla has been doing, but it seems like the "improvement" they added is actually just a workaround for distros that configure filesystems incorrectly. That is, his machine is configured to use an obsolete filesystem (ext3) in a mode with significant performance problems (data=ordered). There are numerous ways that a machine can be mis-configured such that it suffers from poor performan…

I find these statements amusing...

As it happens, neither is ext3 an obsolete filesystem (I have many machines using it just fine, thank you, with no intention to migrate to less tested filesystems just because they're "new"), nor "data=ordered" has significant performance problems.

More amusing than this just the fact that the filesystem is a bottleneck for a web browser... an application that should be network and CPU bound...

Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser

#8

Post by mbrubeck » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 6:55 PM UTC

sciurus wrote: post #3

Can anyone point to the bugzilla entries for the fixes?

I'm not sure which exact bug was the culprit here, but this is a list of related to responsiveness problems caused by the "places" database: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=69150...

Some notable ones that were fixed recently include http://bugzil.la/690354 and http://bugzil.la/686025

Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser

#9

Post by nohat » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:10 PM UTC

CrLf wrote: post #7

jmillikin wrote: post #4

Not to discount the work that Mozilla has been doing, but it seems like the "improvement" they added is actually just a workaround for distros that configure filesystems incorrectly. That is, his machine is configured to use an obsolete filesystem (ext3) in a mode with significant performance problems (data=ordered). There are numerous ways that a machine can be mis-configured such that it suffers from poor performan…

I find these statements amusing... As it happens, neither is ext3 an obsolete filesystem (I have many machines using it just fine, thank you, with no intention to migrate to less tested filesystems just because they're "new"), nor "data=ordered" has significant performance problems. More amusing than this just the fact that the filesystem is a bottleneck for a web browser... an application that should be network and…

I would agree that calling ext3 obsolete is odd, but I don't know enough about the particulars of file system performance to understand why data=ordered is or is not problematic. This leads to the interesting problem of judging the opinion of several contradicting, but apparently similarly qualified people. I'm sure someone on HN is able to decisively explain: can someone do so?

Re: Good news: Mozilla fixed their damn browser

#10

Post by jmillikin » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:11 PM UTC

CrLf wrote: post #7

jmillikin wrote: post #4

Not to discount the work that Mozilla has been doing, but it seems like the "improvement" they added is actually just a workaround for distros that configure filesystems incorrectly. That is, his machine is configured to use an obsolete filesystem (ext3) in a mode with significant performance problems (data=ordered). There are numerous ways that a machine can be mis-configured such that it suffers from poor performan…

I find these statements amusing... As it happens, neither is ext3 an obsolete filesystem (I have many machines using it just fine, thank you, with no intention to migrate to less tested filesystems just because they're "new"), nor "data=ordered" has significant performance problems. More amusing than this just the fact that the filesystem is a bottleneck for a web browser... an application that should be network and…

data=ordered certainly does have significant performance problems. Most notably, it causes fsync() to actually act like sync(), so flushing a single file to disk can potentially cause a flush of the entire disk buffer instead!