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Internet => Web Browsing & Email => Topic started by: kitz on October 08, 2009, 06:19:04 AM

Title: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: kitz on October 08, 2009, 06:19:04 AM
Is anyone else having a problem with FF 3.5.x of late?

I started noticing that the site seems really slow to load and its been annoying me.. particularly on the main site javascript menu which is one of the last things to load... or if attempting to post in the forum. Its really really noticeable with the main site nav menu though  :(


Since Ive been coding and updating all night I decided to have a quick shufty to see if I could see what is causing it, or if I'd done anything...  but all the code is fine.

Yet when I check the site in IE, Opera & Chrome it flies.
Tried doing all the usual stuff clearing cache tempfiles etc - no joy.


I was a bit late upgrading the latest version and Im not sure if this co-incided or not..  Ive had a look around and theres a longish thread on mozilla (http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=nl&forumId=1&comments_threshold=0&comments_parentId=378828&comments_offset=0&comments_per_page=20&thread_style=commentStyle_plain), where others are complaining about how slow it is, and theres a few other comments about the handling of javascript.   Not seen a solution though... some have down-graded to previous versions.

Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: roseway on October 08, 2009, 07:19:15 AM
Now you mention it, yes, I see the same delay loading the javascript menu on the main site with FF 3.5.3. Opera loads it with no delay. On the forum, there are occasional pauses when navigating or posting with FF, and I don't remember seeing these when using Opera.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: kitz on October 08, 2009, 07:45:29 AM
Yep Im also using 3.5.3.  

I really noticed it tonight..  but the server load was practically zero so its not the site.   I havent changed the JS menu script for years so its not that either.  
I notice it seems to be worse when handling any dynamic scripts such as javascript.. or ajax such as SMF forum software uses.

Looking around a bit more there seems to be a fair few complaints about it.
May go back to using Opera at this rate :/



Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: camallison on October 08, 2009, 10:00:54 AM
I suspect it is something to do with the java handling implementation- java-rich sites seem to be most affected.

Colin
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: roseway on October 08, 2009, 10:09:03 AM
Do you mean java or javascript? I don't see any problem with java in Firefox.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: camallison on October 08, 2009, 01:46:19 PM
ooops - non-techie - meant javascript   :-[
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: roseway on October 08, 2009, 02:19:32 PM
Sorry, I didn't mean to cause you embarrassment. :)  It's one of the minor irritations of computer software, that two quite different things have such similar names.

Java is a standalone programming language, which has nothing directly to do with browsers. Java programs can be embedded in web pages in much the same way as Flash videos are embedded, but they're still quite separate from the browser. When you install Java it's installed system-wide, and all browsers will normally make use of the same Java libraries. So Java performance shouldn't vary between different browsers on the same system.

Javascript however is specifically designed to add rich programmable features to web pages. The code which interprets the Javascript is built into the browser, and each browser has its own code, so Javascript performance does vary between different browsers on the same system.

The similarity of name derives from the fact that Javascript was designed to have similar syntax to Java, so the code which the programmer writes looks much the same.

Sorry about the lecture. I get carried away sometimes. ;D
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: camallison on October 08, 2009, 05:04:19 PM
NP = not a lecture, but a chance to learn.  I am familiar with java, having launched an app for java-based phones - see www.pinoptic.com and the download for Nokia handsets.  My computing learning was/is all self-taught and there are gaps  ;)
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: broadstairs on October 08, 2009, 05:20:13 PM
Getting back to the original point. I have noticed that FF takes a while to load but thought that it was just that there was a lot else going on. Today I did follow a couple of points followed from a Mozilla thread about cleaning up temp files etc. Then this afternoon having come back from the beach  ::) and turned on the PC I left it until everything had come up OK and timed FF 3.5.3 starting it took 23 seconds from the double click to the window opening. Now not really sure how long it took before. Once opened it only takes 2-3 seconds  to re-open if I close all the windows. I suppose 23 seconds for an initial open is a tad long....
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: MartinGoose on October 08, 2009, 08:20:43 PM
Have you defraged your Firefox databases lately? See:
http://www.crystalidea.com/speedyfox
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: Chrysalis on October 12, 2009, 08:31:32 AM
ff 3.5.3 in my opinion has issues, especially when a tab or 2 has mu,timedia flash content open, there is a large bug page detailing it that has had no interest from developers (probably means it is hard to fix) and a 2nd problem with firefox in their attempt to try and fix memory leaks is it now caches conservatively which is even allowing IE to outperform it.  I think I will go back to just opera and maxthon now.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: camallison on October 12, 2009, 08:49:40 AM
Have you defraged your Firefox databases lately? See:
http://www.crystalidea.com/speedyfox

WOW - that has certainly made a difference - starts in 3 seconds instead of 20+

I hope the change is lasting.

Colin
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: MartinGoose on October 12, 2009, 09:11:21 AM
Quote
I hope the change is lasting.

Just repeat as necessary.

PS I run the Linux version of Firefox so use:
for f in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $f 'VACUUM;'; done
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: roseway on October 12, 2009, 09:27:19 AM
PS I run the Linux version of Firefox so use:
for f in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $f 'VACUUM;'; done


Thanks very much for that one Martin. I'm hoping that it might solve another problem, that FF fails to shut down properly.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: kitz on October 12, 2009, 12:21:20 PM
Ive noticed that it seems to have large memory leaks too.  If I leave a browser going for a while.. theres many a time when Ive seen a single instance of FF using up to 1GB of memory.

In fact right now, even though I opened a fresh instance of FF about a couple of hours ago, its using by far the most resources on my PC.. and thats including some hefty apps that I would expect to need a fair bit of RAM.

As chrysalis says even IE out performs FF these days and works much faster.

>> Have you defraged your Firefox databases lately?

Thanks for that linky - i'll give it a go in a min.



I still think you shouldnt need to use add ins or such like just to sort out issues like this and firefox need to look further into this...  particularly when it comes at a critical time when Firefox is beginning to become more popular with the general public.   
They will also be loosing a huge oppurtunity with the release of windows 7 just around the corner, and users being able to choose a browser.  I wonder how many will try it and then think IE is faster I'll go back to that.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: kitz on October 12, 2009, 12:27:27 PM
That certainly seems to have helped.   It does load much quicker now..  and although Ive only given it a quick test..  Im not seeing the huge lag time on the javascript menu now.

Thank you.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: MartinGoose on October 12, 2009, 03:06:31 PM
Quote
I still think you shouldnt need to use add ins or such like just to sort out issues like this and firefox need to look further into this...  particularly when it comes at a critical time when Firefox is beginning to become more popular with the general public.

I agree. Apparently the next major release of Firefox will defrag automatically when idle for more than x minutes.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: Chrysalis on October 12, 2009, 04:42:58 PM
I have ran speedyfox as well, and hope it helps me.

I have not really had issues with slow starts tho but rather with FF suttering on scrolling and playing video clips etc.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: nomeames on October 14, 2009, 09:59:18 AM
FF 3.5.3 is indeed slow. I switched to using Chrome now but that too seems to have compatibility issues with some webpages. They won't open in Chrome but opens fine with FF / IE. Hope FF 3.6 would be able to sort out the issues. A sneak peek  ;)

http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/14/firefox-3-6-will-support-accelerometers-make-the-internet-seasi/

(Not sure what an accelerometer is)  :)
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: roseway on October 14, 2009, 10:35:51 AM
An accelerometer is a device which measures acceleration. In that demo the accelerometer built into the laptop is detecting that the laptop is being rotated, and feeding this into FF to modify its display. Fascinating and quite useless. ;D

Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: nomeames on October 14, 2009, 11:08:20 AM
An accelerometer is a device which measures acceleration. In that demo the accelerometer built into the laptop is detecting that the laptop is being rotated, and feeding this into FF to modify its display. Fascinating and quite useless. ;D



Perhaps it would have helped Leonardo de caprio if he wanted to use a alptop before Titanic sank.  ::)

Instead of useless features if they can get FF to work faster (as it was before 3.5), everyone would appreciate that. Anyone from Mozilla listening? 
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: MartinGoose on October 14, 2009, 11:41:13 AM

An accelerometer is a device which measures acceleration. In that demo the accelerometer built into the laptop is detecting that the laptop is being rotated, and feeding this into FF to modify its display. Fascinating and quite useless. ;D
I seem to recall that there was some suggestion that accelerometers (and GPS) fitted in laptops being used on the West Coast of the USA might become a community based earthquake monitoring system. It seems that many modern hard disks have accelerometers fitted but the data they generate is not generally accessible beyond the confines of the HD.   Google may find something for you.

Perhaps not quite useless after all ;)

On the other hand I may just be making it all up :'(
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: roseway on October 14, 2009, 11:44:36 AM
Quote
Perhaps not quite useless after all

I'm sure you're right. It was the connection with the Firefox display which I rate as useless. :)
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: Chrysalis on October 27, 2009, 01:36:58 PM
guys here is the bug report related to my problem, the devs refuse to mark it confirmed although it has a lot of evidence backing it up. not great reading for non techy people.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490122
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: nomeames on November 03, 2009, 05:12:39 PM
Something is seriously wrong. Whats taking so long for Mozilla to act. Firefox used to be the best web browser. Now it is the worst (in my opinion). IE / Chrome are way faster now. I hoped things to change after V3.5.4 came out. But its the same. In my computer it takes something between 25-40 secs to start up. :thumbdown: (Thats after running the cleanup tool someone suggested in this thread).  :thumbdown:
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: oldfogy on November 03, 2009, 05:22:49 PM
No problem here.

But don't forget the first couple of times of opening sites after a clean-up, it has to re-load ALL of the info back into your cach.

Don't forget, what you actually see on your PC screen has to be downloaded onto your PC first.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: Chrysalis on November 04, 2009, 09:19:16 PM
I would agree its currently the worst for the simple reason it cannot even scroll pages smoothly and play videos smoothly, these are very basic performance expectations from a web browser that should be got right before everything else.

For those who dont want to read the long page or dont understand it the bug is to do with 'garbage collection', basically in V3 firefox decided to work on reducing the memory consumption in firefox as v2 had a rep for leaking memory.  The changes included making the caching go to disk instead of ram and flushing the memory at set intervals (garbage collection).  When loads of tabs are open and especially ones with multimedia content then this flushing causes firefox to stutter.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: kitz on November 07, 2009, 10:28:11 AM
I notice that in the last week or so FF has had a couple of updates

3.5.4 - Bug fixes (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=ALL%20status1.9.1%3A.4-fixed) (theres a lot in there to wade through)

3.5.5 - Bug fixes (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=ALL%20status1.9.1%3A.5-fixed)

Mine still seems to be running better since I used the fix tool...
... although I did notice yesterday it still seemed to be having some sort of memory leak issue and I was using >300,000K in a browser window that I'd had open for a while.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: Chrysalis on November 09, 2009, 03:30:11 AM
rather have memory leaks than stutter to be honest. :(

I suggested to the FF dev's to add a setting in relation to if its running on a low spec machine or not, the setting can be on by default, which would run the GC routines to keep mem usage down, and could be turned off by those with ram to spare and who want to fix the stuttering issues.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: kitz on November 09, 2009, 01:11:29 PM
I too have noticed the stutter on sites like youtube, or say BBC..  also noticed that the sound at the beginning can often whine. 
At first I thought it may be the stream, but it also occurs when there should be sufficient already in the buffer.

Thing is my PC isnt really that low spec -
3GB ram
NVidia GeForce 8600 GT
Intel Quad Core -  4 x Q6600 @ 2.4GHz
 
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: HPsauce on December 20, 2009, 05:44:16 PM
I was sorting out a PC yesterday that was very slow on FireFox.
Installed the latest v3.6 Beta and it's a whole lot better.
Seems fine, several comments suggest it's probably the last 3.6 beta and it will upgrade automatically to the released version.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: Chrysalis on December 30, 2009, 08:25:15 PM
3.6 is a very significant improvement I agree, although the bug I have is not fully resolved in it.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: Chrysalis on May 13, 2010, 03:50:54 AM
guys a new extension is released called bartab, it is superb for the bug I have and others with the same bug as me confirmed is a good workaround.

However for people who have issues with either high ram usage on firefox and dont like the slow startup time it does wonders for that also.

Basically bartab unloads idle tabs, and also sets all tabs as idle when you start firefox.  So if you have 100 tabs and start firefox, it will load the first one and just have 99 tabs in the tab bar but not load the sites. If you click on the tab it will load the page on demand, and after a while will then unload the site to reclaim resources.  You can excempt sites if required, such as pages that you need to keep loaded that auto refresh etc.

The bug I reported on here also has been confirmed due to the garbage collection feature on firefox and it gets worse when more tabs are open, which is why people with little tab use dont see it and why bartab sort of fixes it.
Title: Re: Firefox 3.5 slow loading.
Post by: geep on May 13, 2010, 09:04:05 PM
Hi,

I've been suffering awful performance with Firefox 3.6.3 running on Slackware 13.0 x86_64 with 4Gb RAM and a Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33GHz.
Firefox 3.6.3 took 90 seconds to start.
And the process firefox-bin was using 1.2Gb RAM according to system monitor - when it's doing nothing!

I fixed it by simply uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox 3.6.3.
Now it starts virtually instantly and only uses about 100Mb RAM.
It's a mystery to me what caused this problem.

My guess is that perhaps the remains of an earlier version of Firefox did something bad!
I had upgraded with each new Firefox release using Slackware-built and released packages using the Slackware
command upgradepkg.
Tonight I completely removed Firefox 3.6.3 using removepkg and re-installed it using installpkg and all is now OK.
These commands are all Slackware-specific, but I suppose that other Linux have something functionally similar.

Cheers,
Peter