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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

#11

Post by TheCoreh »

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?

As with most native A/B tests, the binary probably ships with code for both functionalities. When the browser launches for the first time they generate a random number, and if it's below a certain threshold you get variant A, above you get variant B. The information gets persisted on disk so it remains unchanged across sessions.

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

#13

Post by akerro »

malnourish wrote: post #9
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.

Have you tried disabling the functionality in about:config?

Yes.

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

#14

Post by uuoc »

This should come as no surprise. It has always been an epic architectural mistake to use the same single non-reentrant Javascript engine to both render the UI and run JS for webpages in Firefox. This change will finally undo that huge mistake made so very long ago.

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

#15

Post by gravypod »

faragon wrote: post #12

Why? Except because of memory allocation serialization impact, there is no reason for a multithreaded process being slower than multiprocess. And if that's the cause, it could be solved using multiple heaps.

I'd guess that it wasn't the effect of switching from threads to processes that made the difference. It might come from code clean up and fixing some of the IPC that was going on. This would have probably seen many eyes in the firefox dev community so they might have made some efforts to clean up the code under the hood before closing the lid on it.

But I might be wrong as I have no ties to the development process of this.

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

#16

Post by wjoe »

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 found Firefox performance to be absolutely awful at work on OS X. I have no issues at all with it at home on Linux, and didn't have any issues in my previous job on OS X either. I'm not sure if it's OS X specific, a change in recent versions, this laptop being underpowered, or the nature of the work I do (a lot of video stuff), but anything JS heavy severely slows down or locks up the browser. And if anything, it's gotten worse over the last few months.

I have to use Chrome for anything video related or JS heavy (monitoring/graphing stuff for the most part), but I'd hate to switch to it for everything. There are too many addons that I rely on in Firefox, on top of my general dislike for Chrome's minimalist UI and standard Google privacy concerns.

I've tried turning on the config option for electrolysis, but it breaks some addons, so that's still a no go for me for now.

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

#17

Post by akerro »

nl wrote: post #8
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.

I wonder if this is the same issue as I'm seeing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12437130 Amazon works for me though. Hmmm.

Very similar issue! My gf walked into it recently on ArchLinux, she had the same problem, for her e10 was enabled by default. When she visisted pons.com the whole browser was frozen for at least 10seconds, and if it didn't unfreeze itself after that time, it was just consuming memory and freezing whole OS until Linux killed Firefox process. My issue was solved by disabling e10s, for her it didn't help so she switched to Opera already.

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

#18

Post by mnarayan01 »

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'…

Firebug is quite often the culprit in these kinds of things in my experience. I can't live without it so I put up with it; if you're switching from Chrome however, it seems that you'd be better off just using the built-in inspection.

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

#19

Post by rsp1984 »

“We can learn from the competition,” said Dotzler. “The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM.”

That's the money quote here. I've been waiting for this for a long time actually. Every browser I've tried except Firefox just basically eats all my RAM and other app performance (e.g. compiling stuff) goes down the toilet.

Then on the other hand FF has not been so snappy and responsive traditionally. So responsive + soft on RAM is the combination I've really been waiting for. Let's hope they can deliver.

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

#20

Post by berberous »

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'…

This seems atypical. Given that you don't use any add-ons, consider resetting your profile. Alternatively, you may wish to disable multi-process for the time being if it's enabled for you (I'm sure there's a flag you can set for that if you Google for it), or upgrade to the beta or alpha builds. In my experience, the beta/alpha builds are usually plenty stable to be a daily driver.
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