How I got Firefox 29 to not be slow.

[linux guy]

Hi people.

I realize this isn't a Fedora issue per se but I thought that being a
number of people running Fedora use FF, I'd share my experience here.

I use FF as my main browser.  My apologies to the Konqueror developers.

I do a lot of online research and it isn't uncommon for me to have 10 FF
instances running with over 50 webpages (tabs) open in total.

Lately FF has been very slow.  Probably since FF27, though at first I
didn't pay much attention.  Lately its been a huge annoyance.

I tried everything to speed it up.  Disabling disk caching, selectively
disabling various flash options, changing the graphics backends, etc.  All
to no avail.

Today I happened to stumble upon the solution to the problem.

Out of frustration I installed Chrome and began to use it.   In doing so I
completely closed all the FF instances I had open.  I've done this before,
but for whatever reason, this time was different.

I was using Chrome, doing some light browsing when I accidentally started a
FF instance.  When I did, I received a message stating that there was
already a FF instance running.  I aborted the startup.  I ran a "ps aux |
grep firefox" only to find a ghost firefox instance still running.  I
killed it.  I then restarted FF, only to find that it is now peppy once
again.

I hope this helps someone.

[Tom Horsley]

On Thu, 5 Jun 2014 09:59:08 -0600
linux guy wrote:
> I ran a "ps aux |
> grep firefox" only to find a ghost firefox instance still running.  I
> killed it.

This seems to be epidemic in browsers. If you use chrome for a while
you'll see it there too.

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Thu, 2014-06-05 at 12:07 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Jun 2014 09:59:08 -0600
> linux guy wrote:
> > I ran a "ps aux |
> > grep firefox" only to find a ghost firefox instance still running.  I
> > killed it.
>
> This seems to be epidemic in browsers. If you use chrome for a while
> you'll see it there too.

At least a little while ago, chrome was even worse when many tabs were
open, IIRC because it consumed a huge number of threads.  Not sure if
that issue has been fixed recently, though.

[Liam Proven]

On 5 June 2014 19:46, Matthew Saltzman  wrote:
> At least a little while ago, chrome was even worse when many tabs were
> open, IIRC because it consumed a huge number of threads.  Not sure if
> that issue has been fixed recently, though.

Chrome runs tabs in _processes_ not threads, AIUI.

[Marcel J.E. Mol]

On Thu, Jun 05, 2014 at 12:07:54PM -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Jun 2014 09:59:08 -0600
> linux guy wrote:
> > I ran a "ps aux |
> > grep firefox" only to find a ghost firefox instance still running.  I
> > killed it.
>
> This seems to be epidemic in browsers. If you use chrome for a while
> you'll see it there too.

I've had similar experiences. Having 50 or more open tabs in several tab groups.
When you look at the ps output next time notices FFs memory usage. I noticed
it tends to use more and more memory over time and a a certain point it just
becomes slow. Therefor I just quit FF overy couple of days and restart it.

-Marcel

[David Beveridge]

On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 7:44 AM, Marcel J.E. Mol  wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 05, 2014 at 12:07:54PM -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> > This seems to be epidemic in browsers. If you use chrome for a while
> > you'll see it there too.
>
> I've had similar experiences. Having 50 or more open tabs in several tab groups.
> When you look at the ps output next time notices FFs memory usage. I noticed
> it tends to use more and more memory over time and a a certain point it just
> becomes slow. Therefor I just quit FF overy couple of days and restart it.

I suspect this is due to badly written javascript on pages that just gobbles up
resources.  In chrome I press SHIFT-ESC to get the task manager open.
Sometimes I find a tab that is using way too much CPU and or memory and
I can kill it.