Firefox slow to start *only* with internet connection [SOLVED]

01 · 2015-02-20 19:19:57

Firefox is incredibly slow to start on my system, but *only* when I have an active internet connection. See the difference in times from running time firefox and then closing the window once it pops up (with a MET-X; I'm running spectrwm, so the delay is pretty neglible).

#w/o internet connection:
real 1.46
user 1.45
sys 0.13

#w/ internet connection:
real 11.58
user 1.53
sys 0.15

There's obviously some update function that's taking 10x as long when I start firefox; I want to figure out what is it and destroy it.

I have disabled all *.update boolean flags in firefox's about:config, but to no avail. I've also been running

firefox -jsconsole -jsdebugger

to try to find logging information about what the browser is doing, but do not see any decent logging information.

Does anyone have any experience and can assist in ways to:
1. Display firefox trace/debugging output? I want to know what's being executed.
2. Disable updates on restart

Thanks in advance.

Last edited by 01 (2015-02-20 19:37:31)

alphaniner · 2015-02-20 19:25:22

Kinda old but maybe relevant. Was first google result for "firefox slow start with network connection".

01 · 2015-02-20 19:35:57

Wow. The solution really is as simple as what is found here

In /etc/hosts, append:

127.0.0.2 yourLocalHostname

So the hang time seems to be in resolving the loopback, which makes sense, since in the timing experiment above, only realtime increased significantly. Thanks!

Vizitor · 2015-02-21 14:18:16

Thank You so much!
Finally! For almost 2 years I didn't use firefox because of 20-30 seconds startup time, and now I have solution here.
I always believed that it is some kind of bug --->

user@computer ~ $ firefox
(process:939): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_slice_set_config: assertion 'sys_page_size == 0' failed

as described here.

parazyd · 2015-02-21 15:11:11

Is the loopback IP 127.0.0.2 a default setting?

Vizitor · 2015-02-22 13:35:51

I put 127.0.0.1 - and now FFox starts in less than second.
Maybe 127.0.0.2 is OpenSuSE way, don't know.

aaroncaffrey · 2015-02-26 11:21:34

I got 2 years old corsair force gt 120 gb ssd and the startup time is minimum 5 seconds, compared to 0.5 seconds in chromium.

I have tried every possible "about:config" and "preferences" tweak in internet, compiled many releases from source, reindex (sqlite vacuum) all databases but nothing worked out.

Removed my 3 plugins, deleted my existing profile, downgraded/upgraded firefox. Even crashidori err midori starts in range of 0.5 - 0.8 seconds, will be glad if anyone could point me any tweak that will solve this annoying delay.

thebunnyrules · 2015-05-11 03:48:42

01 wrote:

Wow. The solution really is as simple as what is found here
In /etc/hosts, append:
127.0.0.2 yourLocalHostname
So the hang time seems to be in resolving the loopback, which makes sense, since in the timing experiment above, only realtime increased significantly. Thanks!

Thank you for the solution 01. It was driving me crazy. I don't think either the FF devs or Arch Linux devs are aware of this issue and it's pretty serious, so I'm going to add it to the Arch wiki and mozilla's forum.

V1del · 2015-05-11 06:36:50

@thebunnyrules

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Be … e#Hostname This is a configuration error, not an issue that either Arch nor Firefox has to solve for you

Arch Linux

#1 2015-02-20 19:19:57