Video performance degradation in F24

[Basil Mohamed Gohar]

Even since I installed F24 on both my desktop as well as my laptop I've
noticed a severe performance degradation in terms of video playback.
One point of note is that I did an upgrade from F22->F23->F24, only
using F23 for the upgrade process.

I've noticed this performance issue in both MATE (my preferred DE) as
well as Gnome.  I have AMD CPUs with AMD GPUs (the laptop is an APU but
also has a discrete card as well).

I don't want to use devel just to report a problem, but I'd also like
some help in diagnosing the issue so that a fix can be found – but
unfortunately I don't really know where to start.
-- 
Libre Video
http://librevideo.org

[Benson Muite]

Blog post here may be relevant:

https://streamcomputing.eu/blog/2016-09-06/transition-period-for-fglrx-to...

Not sure exact hardware you are using, so may not be directly relevant. 
If it is, there is a recent Fedora magazine article on applying kernel 
patches.



On 09/08/2016 03:44 AM, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:
>  Even since I installed F24 on both my desktop as well as my laptop
> I've
>  noticed a severe performance degradation in terms of video playback.
>  One point of note is that I did an upgrade from F22->F23->F24, only
>  using F23 for the upgrade process.
>
>  I've noticed this performance issue in both MATE (my preferred DE) as
>  well as Gnome.  I have AMD CPUs with AMD GPUs (the laptop is an APU but
>  also has a discrete card as well).
>
>  I don't want to use devel just to report a problem, but I'd also like
>  some help in diagnosing the issue so that a fix can be found – but
>  unfortunately I don't really know where to start.

[Basil Mohamed Gohar]

On 09/08/2016 01:27 AM, Benson Muite wrote:
>  Blog post here may be relevant:
>  
>
> https://streamcomputing.eu/blog/2016-09-06/transition-period-for-fglrx-to...
>  
>  
>  Not sure exact hardware you are using, so may not be directly relevant.
>  If it is, there is a recent Fedora magazine article on applying kernel
>  patches.
>  
>  
>  
>  On 09/08/2016 03:44 AM, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:
> > Even since I installed F24 on both my desktop as well as my laptop I've
> > noticed a severe performance degradation in terms of video playback.
> > One point of note is that I did an upgrade from F22->F23->F24, only
> > using F23 for the upgrade process.
> >
> > I've noticed this performance issue in both MATE (my preferred DE) as
> > well as Gnome.  I have AMD CPUs with AMD GPUs (the laptop is an APU but
> > also has a discrete card as well).
> >
> > I don't want to use devel just to report a problem, but I'd also like
> > some help in diagnosing the issue so that a fix can be found – but
> > unfortunately I don't really know where to start. 
Benson,

Thank you for that information.  However, I don't use fglrx, I've always
used the radeon drivers that come standard in Fedora.

>  [basilgohar@alpha ~]$ lsmod | grep radeon
>  radeon               1507328  9
>  i2c_algo_bit           16384  1 radeon
>  drm_kms_helper        143360  1 radeon
>  ttm                    90112  1 radeon
>  drm                   339968  12 ttm,drm_kms_helper,radeon 
So, unless that issue also means standard open-source kernel drivers are
lacking support for the kernel used in F24  (which would seem really
very odd), then that particular issue is probably not the reason for my
slow video.
-- 
Libre Video
http://librevideo.org

[stan]

On Sat, 10 Sep 2016 22:04:22 -0400
Basil Mohamed Gohar <basilgohar(a)librevideo.org&gt; wrote:


>  > On 09/08/2016 03:44 AM, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:  
>  >> Even since I installed F24 on both my desktop as well as my laptop
>  >> I've noticed a severe performance degradation in terms of video
>  >> playback. 
Is this using a browser, or a player on the system, like vlc or mplayer?
What does your 'severe performance degradation' consist of?  Dropped
frames?  Lock up?  Artifacts?  Could network congestion or speed be a
factor?  Or do you just mean that the gui is slow to respond?

>  >>
>  >> I've noticed this performance issue in both MATE (my preferred DE)
>  >> as well as Gnome.  I have AMD CPUs with AMD GPUs (the laptop is an
>  >> APU but also has a discrete card as well).
>  >>
>  >> I don't want to use devel just to report a problem, but I'd also 
This really belongs on users.  You can subscribe to users by
sending an email message to
users-request(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
with subscribe in the subject line, and from email address
basilgohar(a)librevideo.org

>  >> like some help in diagnosing the issue so that a fix can be
> found
>  >> – but unfortunately I don't really know where to start. 
What does top show happening on your system when you notice the problem?
How about iotop?  Is there lots of disk usage happening? Are there
things like locate or other search aids running in the background to
update their databases?  Are you updating your system when it seems
slow? Is your system memory constrained?  Other cron scheduled jobs?
This usually is really heavy early in system usage as they build their
databases, and then tapers off as only incremental changes are made.

It's unlikely to be due to F24, more likely to be due to your situation.

[Basil Mohamed Gohar]

On 09/11/2016 02:19 PM, stan wrote:
>  On Sat, 10 Sep 2016 22:04:22 -0400
>  Basil Mohamed Gohar <basilgohar(a)librevideo.org&gt; wrote:
>  
>  
> >> On 09/08/2016 03:44 AM, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:  
> >>> Even since I installed F24 on both my desktop as well as my laptop
> >>> I've noticed a severe performance degradation in terms of video
> >>> playback.
>  
>  Is this using a browser, or a player on the system, like vlc or mplayer?
>  What does your 'severe performance degradation' consist of?  Dropped
>  frames?  Lock up?  Artifacts?  Could network congestion or speed be a
>  factor?  Or do you just mean that the gui is slow to respond? 
Okay, I've found the issue is in Firefox and Totem, but not VLC.  So,
apparently some form of acceleration is borked but not another (guessing).

>  
> >>>
> >>> I've noticed this performance issue in both MATE (my preferred DE)
> >>> as well as Gnome.  I have AMD CPUs with AMD GPUs (the laptop is an
> >>> APU but also has a discrete card as well).
> >>>
> >>> I don't want to use devel just to report a problem, but I'd also
>  
>  This really belongs on users.  You can subscribe to users by
>  sending an email message to
>  users-request(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  with subscribe in the subject line, and from email address
>  basilgohar(a)librevideo.org
>  
> >>> like some help in diagnosing the issue so that a fix can be found
> >>> – but unfortunately I don't really know where to start.
>  
>  What does top show happening on your system when you notice the problem?
>  How about iotop?  Is there lots of disk usage happening? Are there
>  things like locate or other search aids running in the background to
>  update their databases?  Are you updating your system when it seems
>  slow? Is your system memory constrained?  Other cron scheduled jobs?
>  This usually is really heavy early in system usage as they build their
>  databases, and then tapers off as only incremental changes are made.
>  
>  It's unlikely to be due to F24, more likely to be due to your situation. 
There's nothing else going on in the systems - this is an upgrade from
F22, so there's not any initialization processes going on.  I did the
upgrade weeks ago, anyway.  CPU does spike, but that's normal for this
kind of video playback, and it's definitely not maxed-out.
>  --
>  devel mailing list
>  devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/[e-mail]
>   

-- 
Libre Video
http://librevideo.org

[Marcel J.E. Mol]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 07:34:56AM -0400, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:
>  On 09/11/2016 02:19 PM, stan wrote:
>  > On Sat, 10 Sep 2016 22:04:22 -0400
>  > Basil Mohamed Gohar <basilgohar(a)librevideo.org&gt; wrote:
>  > 
>  > 
>  >>> On 09/08/2016 03:44 AM, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:  
>  >>>> Even since I installed F24 on both my desktop as well as my laptop
>  >>>> I've noticed a severe performance degradation in terms of video
>  >>>> playback.
>  > 
>  > Is this using a browser, or a player on the system, like vlc or mplayer?
>  > What does your 'severe performance degradation' consist of?  Dropped
>  > frames?  Lock up?  Artifacts?  Could network congestion or speed be a
>  > factor?  Or do you just mean that the gui is slow to respond?
>  
>  Okay, I've found the issue is in Firefox and Totem, but not VLC.  So,
>  apparently some form of acceleration is borked but not another (guessing). 
I saw similar video performance degradation in firefox. But when I switch
to full screen view performance is fine. Maybe firefox does not use
GPU acceleration (vdpau in my case) properly when viewing in a window, but
does so when in full screen.

>  >>>>
>  >>>> I've noticed this performance issue in both MATE (my preferred DE)
>  >>>> as well as Gnome.  I have AMD CPUs with AMD GPUs (the laptop is an
>  >>>> APU but also has a discrete card as well).
>  >>>>
>  >>>> I don't want to use devel just to report a problem, but I'd
> also
>  > 
>  > This really belongs on users.  You can subscribe to users by
>  > sending an email message to
>  > users-request(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  > with subscribe in the subject line, and from email address
>  > basilgohar(a)librevideo.org
>  > 
>  >>>> like some help in diagnosing the issue so that a fix can be found
>  >>>> – but unfortunately I don't really know where to start.
>  > 
>  > What does top show happening on your system when you notice the problem?
>  > How about iotop?  Is there lots of disk usage happening? Are there
>  > things like locate or other search aids running in the background to
>  > update their databases?  Are you updating your system when it seems
>  > slow? Is your system memory constrained?  Other cron scheduled jobs?
>  > This usually is really heavy early in system usage as they build their
>  > databases, and then tapers off as only incremental changes are made.
>  > 
>  > It's unlikely to be due to F24, more likely to be due to your situation.
>  
>  There's nothing else going on in the systems - this is an upgrade from
>  F22, so there's not any initialization processes going on.  I did the
>  upgrade weeks ago, anyway.  CPU does spike, but that's normal for this
>  kind of video playback, and it's definitely not maxed-out.
>  > --
>  > devel mailing list
>  > devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/[e-mail]
>  > 
>  
>  
>  -- 
>  Libre Video
>  http://librevideo.org
>  --
>  devel mailing list
>  devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/[e-mail] 
-- 
     ======--------         Marcel J.E. Mol                MESA Consulting B.V.
    =======---------        ph. [phone]
    =======---------        marcel(a)mesa.nl                 Nootdorp
__==== www.mesa.nl ---____U_n_i_x______I_n_t_e_r_n_e_t____ The Netherlands ____
 They couldn't think of a number,     Linux user 1148  --  www linuxcounter net
    so they gave me a name!  -- Rupert Hine  --  www ruperthine com --

[stan]

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 13:39:30 +0200
"Marcel J.E. Mol" <marcel(a)mesa.nl&gt; wrote:

>  On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 07:34:56AM -0400, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:
[snip]
>  > Okay, I've found the issue is in Firefox and Totem, but not
> VLC.
>  > So, apparently some form of acceleration is borked but not another
>  > (guessing).  
>  
>  I saw similar video performance degradation in firefox. But when I
>  switch to full screen view performance is fine. Maybe firefox does
>  not use GPU acceleration (vdpau in my case) properly when viewing in
>  a window, but does so when in full screen. 
If it is related to hardware acceleration, in the development version
of firefox called nightly there is a preference option under
Preferences -> Advanced -> Use hardware acceleration when available.

It might be available to use in the production version.  Worth a look,
at least.

>  > There's nothing else going on in the systems - this is an
> upgrade
>  > from F22, so there's not any initialization processes going on.  I
>  > did the upgrade weeks ago, anyway.  CPU does spike, but that's
>  > normal for this kind of video playback, and it's definitely not
>  > maxed-out.   
A puzzle indeed.  I too use the radeon driver and have seen no video
degradation.  When videos are playing slowly in firefox here, it is
because the video site is busy and providing video slowly.  I've
noticed that the size of the pipe doesn't really seem to matter
anymore, the sites feed their videos out in dribs and drabs
regardless.  It used to be that they would send the whole video
immediately, no longer.  And youtube will degrade the quality if it
gets too far behind the curve, and delay of play is excessive.

Another thing that can degrade performance on some websites is that
they run really inefficient scripts on the client side.  If you don't
already use one of them, you could try installing noscript or umatrix
to limit the third party usage of your cpu.

I have seen a general performance issue when I compiled a kernel, and
decided to use the new SLOB slab allocater.  When I ran a compile, the
computer became unusable until it was done.  But, if you are running a
stock Fedora kernel, that shouldn't be an issue for you.

Out of ideas, maybe someone else will have a suggestion.

[Basil Mohamed Gohar]

On 09/11/2016 02:19 PM, stan wrote:
>  On Sat, 10 Sep 2016 22:04:22 -0400
>  Basil Mohamed Gohar <basilgohar(a)librevideo.org&gt; wrote:
>  
>  
> >> On 09/08/2016 03:44 AM, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:  
> >>> Even since I installed F24 on both my desktop as well as my laptop
> >>> I've noticed a severe performance degradation in terms of video
> >>> playback.
>  
>  Is this using a browser, or a player on the system, like vlc or mplayer?
>  What does your 'severe performance degradation' consist of?  Dropped
>  frames?  Lock up?  Artifacts?  Could network congestion or speed be a
>  factor?  Or do you just mean that the gui is slow to respond?
>  
> >>>
> >>> I've noticed this performance issue in both MATE (my preferred DE)
> >>> as well as Gnome.  I have AMD CPUs with AMD GPUs (the laptop is an
> >>> APU but also has a discrete card as well).
> >>>
> >>> I don't want to use devel just to report a problem, but I'd also
>  
>  This really belongs on users.  You can subscribe to users by
>  sending an email message to
>  users-request(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  with subscribe in the subject line, and from email address
>  basilgohar(a)librevideo.org
>  
> >>> like some help in diagnosing the issue so that a fix can be found
> >>> – but unfortunately I don't really know where to start.
>  
>  What does top show happening on your system when you notice the problem?
>  How about iotop?  Is there lots of disk usage happening? Are there
>  things like locate or other search aids running in the background to
>  update their databases?  Are you updating your system when it seems
>  slow? Is your system memory constrained?  Other cron scheduled jobs?
>  This usually is really heavy early in system usage as they build their
>  databases, and then tapers off as only incremental changes are made.
>  
>  It's unlikely to be due to F24, more likely to be due to your situation.
>  --
>  devel mailing list
>  devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/[e-mail]
>   
I should add that the problem in Totem and Firefox worsens as the video
takes-up more screen space - smaller windows (same resolution source
file) render more smoothly.  Again, VLC is just fine full screen, no
noticeable performance issue.

-- 
Libre Video
http://librevideo.org

[Zdenek Kabelac]

Dne 12.9.2016 v 17:48 Basil Mohamed Gohar napsal(a):
>  On 09/11/2016 02:19 PM, stan wrote:
> > On Sat, 10 Sep 2016 22:04:22 -0400
> > Basil Mohamed Gohar <basilgohar(a)librevideo.org&gt; wrote:
> >
> >
> >>> On 09/08/2016 03:44 AM, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:
> >>>> Even since I installed F24 on both my desktop as well as my laptop
> >>>> I've noticed a severe performance degradation in terms of video
> >>>> playback.
> >
> > Is this using a browser, or a player on the system, like vlc or mplayer?
> > What does your 'severe performance degradation' consist of?  Dropped
> > frames?  Lock up?  Artifacts?  Could network congestion or speed be a
> > factor?  Or do you just mean that the gui is slow to respond?
> >
> >>>>
> >>>> I've noticed this performance issue in both MATE (my preferred DE)
> >>>> as well as Gnome.  I have AMD CPUs with AMD GPUs (the laptop is an
> >>>> APU but also has a discrete card as well).
> >>>>
> >>>> I don't want to use devel just to report a problem, but I'd also
> >
> > This really belongs on users.  You can subscribe to users by
> > sending an email message to
> > users-request(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> > with subscribe in the subject line, and from email address
> > basilgohar(a)librevideo.org
> >
> >>>> like some help in diagnosing the issue so that a fix can be found
> >>>> – but unfortunately I don't really know where to start.
> >
> > What does top show happening on your system when you notice the problem?
> > How about iotop?  Is there lots of disk usage happening? Are there
> > things like locate or other search aids running in the background to
> > update their databases?  Are you updating your system when it seems
> > slow? Is your system memory constrained?  Other cron scheduled jobs?
> > This usually is really heavy early in system usage as they build their
> > databases, and then tapers off as only incremental changes are made.
> >
> > It's unlikely to be due to F24, more likely to be due to your situation. 
Personally I'm also interested why the video playback  in Firefox is so horrible.

I'm using C2D - this is easily capable to play high bitrate FullHD movies in 
mplayer.

Yet it gets chooked by quite low-bandwidth low quality 640-pixel-wide videos 
from Youtube.

Doesn't really matter much if the native h265 codec is used or it's passed 
through the oldish 'flash' adobe plugin.

Looking at 'perf' trace - it obviously spends ages in libxul -  and it's very

quickly passing though ffmpeg library used now by 'ff'.

There is some 'minor' difference between   h265/flash playback smoothness - 
but none of them is NOWHERE near to be usable.

So whenever I want to see a video playing fluently without using some later 
4x3GHz i7 CPU -  I simply need to download video and play via mplayer....

I'd love to see some progress here - but it's getting worst with each new 
relase of FF - not mentionion  'FF' starts to cut interfaces so less and less 
plugins do work. And no I see zero interest of 'ff' group to solve this issue 
for Linux - they mostly care purely about windows these days :(....


And of course horrible playback is in '-safe-mode' as well - so no plugin 
could be accused for this. As well as I'm using -nodebug Fedora kernels
and latest/greatest  SNA xf86 driver.

Regards

Zdenek

[Basil Mohamed Gohar]

On 09/12/2016 01:21 PM, Zdenek Kabelac wrote:
>  Dne 12.9.2016 v 17:48 Basil Mohamed Gohar napsal(a):
> > On 09/11/2016 02:19 PM, stan wrote:
> >> On Sat, 10 Sep 2016 22:04:22 -0400
> >> Basil Mohamed Gohar <basilgohar(a)librevideo.org&gt; wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>> On 09/08/2016 03:44 AM, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:
> >>>>> Even since I installed F24 on both my desktop as well as my laptop
> >>>>> I've noticed a severe performance degradation in terms of video
> >>>>> playback.
> >>
> >> Is this using a browser, or a player on the system, like vlc or mplayer?
> >> What does your 'severe performance degradation' consist of?  Dropped
> >> frames?  Lock up?  Artifacts?  Could network congestion or speed be a
> >> factor?  Or do you just mean that the gui is slow to respond?
> >>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I've noticed this performance issue in both MATE (my preferred
> DE)
> >>>>> as well as Gnome.  I have AMD CPUs with AMD GPUs (the laptop is an
> >>>>> APU but also has a discrete card as well).
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I don't want to use devel just to report a problem, but I'd
> also
> >>
> >> This really belongs on users.  You can subscribe to users by
> >> sending an email message to
> >> users-request(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> >> with subscribe in the subject line, and from email address
> >> basilgohar(a)librevideo.org
> >>
> >>>>> like some help in diagnosing the issue so that a fix can be found
> >>>>> – but unfortunately I don't really know where to start.
> >>
> >> What does top show happening on your system when you notice the problem?
> >> How about iotop?  Is there lots of disk usage happening? Are there
> >> things like locate or other search aids running in the background to
> >> update their databases?  Are you updating your system when it seems
> >> slow? Is your system memory constrained?  Other cron scheduled jobs?
> >> This usually is really heavy early in system usage as they build their
> >> databases, and then tapers off as only incremental changes are made.
> >>
> >> It's unlikely to be due to F24, more likely to be due to your situation.
>  
>  Personally I'm also interested why the video playback  in Firefox is so
>  horrible.
>  
>  I'm using C2D - this is easily capable to play high bitrate FullHD
>  movies in mplayer.
>  
>  Yet it gets chooked by quite low-bandwidth low quality 640-pixel-wide
>  videos from Youtube.
>  
>  Doesn't really matter much if the native h265 codec is used or it's
>  passed through the oldish 'flash' adobe plugin.
>  
>  Looking at 'perf' trace - it obviously spends ages in libxul -  and it's
>  very quickly passing though ffmpeg library used now by 'ff'.
>  
>  There is some 'minor' difference between   h265/flash playback
>  smoothness - but none of them is NOWHERE near to be usable.
>  
>  So whenever I want to see a video playing fluently without using some
>  later 4x3GHz i7 CPU -  I simply need to download video and play via
>  mplayer....
>  
>  I'd love to see some progress here - but it's getting worst with each
>  new relase of FF - not mentionion  'FF' starts to cut interfaces so less
>  and less plugins do work. And no I see zero interest of 'ff' group to
>  solve this issue for Linux - they mostly care purely about windows these
>  days :(....
>  
>  
>  And of course horrible playback is in '-safe-mode' as well - so no
>  plugin could be accused for this. As well as I'm using -nodebug Fedora
>  kernels
>  and latest/greatest  SNA xf86 driver.
>  
>  Regards
>  
>  Zdenek 
Funny, mplayer by default has the same or similar stuttering that I see
in Totem and Firefox.  I haven't tried with different draw/acceleration
methods (there are plenty), so it's whatever's being used by default.

Again, to contrast, VLC video playback is smooth as butter.


-- 
Libre Video
http://librevideo.org