can someone suggest why firefox is so &$*&^%*#^&%* slow?

[Fred Smith]

On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 11:01:41AM -0400, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 07:36:19PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-09-24 at 10:44 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > >   i am at my wit's end with firefox on my fedora rawhide system -- to
> > > say it's nad-grindingly slow would be charitable. just now, i tried
> > > clicking on another tab ... some 30 seconds later, i am still waiting
> > > for the tab to change, oh, wait, there it is.
> > > 
> > >   watching any sort of youtube video is excruciating ... while audio
> > > is typically, i will frequently get *maybe* one frame change a second,
> > > i kid you not. i frequently get javascripts that are not responding,
> > > and i'm asked whether i want to wait for them.
> > > 
> > >   is there *something* i can do to debug this? what firefox
> > > configuration settings should i be looking at? i'm willing to try
> > > anything because, at this point, firefox is utterly unusable. even
> > > something as simple as scrolling in a window is painfully slow.
> > > 
> > >   oh, and i'm on a quad core i7, so i'm pretty sure horsepower isn't
> > > the problem.
> > 
> > FWIW, I've been seeing some odd 'laggy' behaviour in F21 on my desktop
> > lately, which does mostly seem to be in Firefox. I do have sixteen
> > zillion tabs open, but I do that a lot and it's not happened before, and
> > RAM isn't exhausted (I have 16GB, using about 8GB). I don't have Flash
> > installed. Not had time to look into it in more detail yet, but it does
> > seem like something squiffy is going on.
> > 
> > The symptoms are basically that things like switching tabs, highlighting
> > text, copy/pasting, or input appearing after I start to type lag by 1-3
> > seconds, and sometimes presses/characters that occur within the lag time
> > are lost.
> 
> I'm having problems with FF on Fedora 19 that just started recently,
> maybe related, maybe not.  In my case, the entire desktop is
> freezing--even the mouse cursor won't move for 5-10 seconds.  It
> always seems to happen when opening a new blank tab in FF.

which reminds me of an issue I've been unable to diagnose, similar but
not the same:
viewing flash video from any site showing flash videos (youtube, cnn,
etc.) using FF, it'll play along very nicely, but every 5-15 (or so)
seconds, the video will pause for 1-3 seconds while the sound continues,
then the video starts moving again.

I recently noted that the right-click menu in the flash window contains
an item something like "info for nerds", which shows among other things,
dropped frames.

so if I watch that window. whenever that pause occurs, as soon as the
video resumes, that window shows a clump of dropped frames. I can't
correlate the timing with anything else that's running. Not even the
Folding At Home client, which I can stop and the pauses still occur.

This is on a six-core AMD Vishera processor, which should have plenty
of ponies under the hood for flash video, even when FAH is running.

so far, I've not had another browser sopporting flash to test.
But the time is coming when I'll get irritated enuff to go find one.

-- 
---- Fred Smith -- fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us -----------------------------
               Show me your ways, O LORD, teach me your paths;
                     Guide me in your truth and teach me,
                         for you are God my Savior,
                    And my hope is in you all day long.
-------------------------- Psalm 25:4-5 (NIV) --------------------------------