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

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2014-09-27 at 05:52 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Fri, 26 Sep 2014, 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.
> 
>   yup, those are/were my symptoms *exactly* -- it's much better now
> that i've disabled flash but that shouldn't have been necessary,
> should it? i'm on a quad core i7 and also have 16G of RAM and not even
> close to using all of it most of the time.
> 
>   so it's a bit of a relief that i'm not the only person seeing this.

FWIW, I rebooted yesterday afternoon to the latest F21 userland and
kernel 3.17.0-0.rc6.git2.2.fc22.1.x86_64 from rawhide-kernel-nodebug
(I've been using those kernels all along) and haven't seen the laggy
behaviour in Firefox since.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net