As I open more windows or tabs in Firefox it becomes slower and slower, finally unusable. It can take as long as 20 seconds to scroll the screen, which tends to scroll in large jumps, even when smooth scroll is enabled. The problem is worse when smooth scrolling is enabled, but is bad enough even when it is not. Other applications seem to have scrolling slowed somewhat when Firefox has many windows open. The problem seems to be related to flash, since when I kill xulrunner/flash, graphics performance gets better, but still does not always become acceptable. Swapping between Firefox windows and tabs is normal.
It looks to me like a memory swapping issue, but I have no evidence beyond my gut.
Right now Firefox has 30 tabs open on all its windows. Performance is bad, though not intolerable.
The system is:
4 processor x86_64 system Fedora-19 with all updates installed, Firefox-25.0, Nvidia GeForce 8400GS with the proprietary driver.
Any ideas what's going on, or how to investigate?
On Tue, 2013-11-05 at 07:02 -0800, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
As I open more windows or tabs in Firefox it becomes slower and slower, finally unusable....
While we're at it, does anyone have recommendations for good graphics cards? Pointers to good review sites?
Thanks - jon
On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 07:05:38 -0800, Jonathan Ryshpan jonrysh@pacbell.net wrote:
On Tue, 2013-11-05 at 07:02 -0800, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
While we're at it, does anyone have recommendations for good graphics cards? Pointers to good review sites?
How are you planning on using them?
Are you willing to use proprietary drivers?
Intel on die video devices seem to have the best drivers right now. They aren't as powerful as what you get with discrete cards, but depending on what you need they might be good enough.
Radeon support has gotten better, but I think it is still a good idea to avoid the last generation or two.
Nouveau currently has some significant limitations with regarding to reclocking with recent nVidia cards. If you want one of those, you probably are going to want to use the proprietary driver. If you get a somewhat older card, the Nouveau driver should be OK.
Neither Radeon nor Nouveau have the level of OpenGL support that the Intel drivers do.
On Tue, 2013-11-05 at 09:20 -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
On Tue, 2013-11-05 at 07:02 -0800, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote: While we're at it, does anyone have recommendations for good graphics cards? Pointers to good review sites?
All very good questions...
How are you planning on using them?
Very straight ahead: Web browsing, some video, office suite, text applications, very little gaming, minimal 3D support.
Are you willing to use proprietary drivers?
Yes. I currently use the proprietary nvidia drivers.
Intel on die video devices seem to have the best drivers right now. They aren't as powerful as what you get with discrete cards, but depending on what you need they might be good enough.
Nice to know, but I'm looking for a (discrete) video card to upgrade my desktop. My current card is a GeForce 8400GS, with which I replaced GeForce 9500GT when its fan burned out. As I remember it, the GeForce 9500GT had less trouble with Firefox, but there have been many changes to other software.
Radeon support has gotten better, but I think it is still a good idea to avoid the last generation or two.
Nouveau currently has some significant limitations with regarding to reclocking with recent nVidia cards. If you want one of those, you probably are going to want to use the proprietary driver. If you get a somewhat older card, the Nouveau driver should be OK.
How old is old? Where is a list of cards that work well with the Nouveau drivers?
Neither Radeon nor Nouveau have the level of OpenGL support that the Intel drivers do.
I assume you mean Intel **open source** drivers. No?
Allegedly, on or about 05 November 2013, Jonathan Ryshpan sent:
My current card is a GeForce 8400GS, with which I replaced GeForce 9500GT when its fan burned out. As I remember it, the GeForce 9500GT had less trouble with Firefox, but there have been many changes to other software
Perhaps your easiest solution, then, is to replace the fan.
I've got a donated graphics card which had a seized fan. So, it's graphics operations got slower and slower until the original owner didn't like it anymore (the card slows itself down, to avoid cooking itself).
I just aimed a case fan across the whole card, cooling the whole card better than the original fan which only cooled one heatsink.
On 11/05/2013 09:02 AM, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
As I open more windows or tabs in Firefox it becomes slower and slower, finally unusable. It can take as long as 20 seconds to scroll the screen, which tends to scroll in large jumps, even when smooth scroll is enabled. The problem is worse when smooth scrolling is enabled, but is bad enough even when it is not. Other applications seem to have scrolling slowed somewhat when Firefox has many windows open. The problem seems to be related to flash, since when I kill xulrunner/flash, graphics performance gets better, but still does not always become acceptable. Swapping between Firefox windows and tabs is normal.
It looks to me like a memory swapping issue, but I have no evidence beyond my gut.
Right now Firefox has 30 tabs open on all its windows. Performance is bad, though not intolerable.
The system is:
4 processor x86_64 system Fedora-19 with all updates installed, Firefox-25.0, Nvidia GeForce 8400GS with the proprietary driver.Any ideas what's going on, or how to investigate?
FWIW, firefox looks like it has a memory leak. With something just over 50 tabs open, my firefox was using 1.4G RAM and rising (was watching it go up using top). After stopping and restarting it (with the same just over 50 tabs) it's using about 400Mb RAM and holding stable. But in a day or so I'll look again and see that it's eating RAM for all it's worth...there's even a comment on the mozilla website about this: "Firefox's memory usage may increase if it's left open for long periods of time. A workaround for this is to periodically restart Firefox. You can configure Firefox to save your tabs and windows so that when you start it again, you can start where you left off. See Restore previous session - Configure when Firefox shows your most recent tabs and windows for details. ". This comment can be found at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-ram. So every now and again a restart of firefox is necessary it appears. Wish they would do something about this.
Kevin
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Bruno Wolff III -
Jonathan Ryshpan -
kevin martin -
Tim