Score:1

Firefox 95.0.1 and earlier versions suddenly becomes unusably slow

uz flag

I'm having a persistent and transient issue with firefox on ubuntu 20.04 with ff 92 / 95, etc.

Basically I can be watching a video, or reading a web page, or filling out a forum and firefox becomes extremely slow, as if I'm using a system which is significantly under powered.

This problem will persist for some time and then suddenly resolve itself, or if I restart firefox, it resolves itself right away.

about:memory and about:performance yield nothing interesting, checking and the nice value of the firefox hasn't changed, there are no xsession errors which correlate to the slow down events and nothing interesting is spewed into dmesg from the kernel.

Does anyone have any ideas on what I should check when this happens again, since it happens regularly..

Oh, I should note that this happens in safe-mode as well, and with all extensions disabled.

Thanks!

guiverc avatar
cn flag
I'd remove all extensions, and see if it still occurs. I'd then slowly add extensions back, as in my experience, some extensions are really bad with memory & can negatively influence performance. I'm using two that cause me to exit firefox/chromium (*same on each*) every day or so, wait for kernel to clean up, then re-start browser for best performance. The issue doesn't occur without extensions, but I use the work-around as I prefer the functionality of the extensions.
Colin Faber avatar
uz flag
Thanks, I've tried with all add-ons removed, as well as starting firefox in safe mode which disables all extentions and add-ons, the same behavior is observed. Flushing page cache (echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches) doesn't seem to matter. It really feel to me like something is triggered within firefox itself and suddenly all user facing operations are depriotirized for something else going on.
guiverc avatar
cn flag
Next I would check you have *swap* enabled and you have enough RAM in your box. Web pages use/require users to have loads of RAM and if your box lacks RAM (or doesn't use *swap* if not enough RAM) then that can create pauses... Lubuntu 20.04 LTS on a default install doesn't include swap for example though Ubuntu 20.04 LTS does.
Colin Faber avatar
uz flag
Swap was lightly used,
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