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I love firefox and their philosophy, but currently I'm having some performance issues that I have no idea how to solve that makes me think about keep using it. My gnome installation usually runs buttery smooth - something some people may even find uncommon - but whenever I open firefox, the desktop it's currently on usually experiences frame drops, lag and freezes. I must highlight on the "the desktop is currently on" because if I have more than one virtual dekstop, all of them work fine except the one firefox is on. If I open overview mode on any other desktop, or trigger the animation to move from desktop to desktop or summon tilix to open in quake mode, all of that works smooth in every virtual desktop, but whenever I try to do those things animations are dropping a lot of frames, sometimes there's lag when moving from or to that virtual desktop and sometimes it appears the animations are freezing for a second.
On the other hand, if I close firefox and open any webkit based browser (I also have Vivaldi installed as an example) there are no side effects on the virtual desktop where the browser lies. So I considered moving to another DE to keep using Firefox buecase well, I love it. But then I installed Deepin and had the same issues, but a lot less evident than they were with gnome. So then I uninstalled Deepin (it had some network issues anyway) and moved to Budgie, just to find the same: it's less accentuated than gnome, but it also happens when moving from / to the virtual desktop where the browser is in, or by poping up tilix in quake mode.
So after all of that I can see they have mutter in common at some point, and the fact all of them are using a GTK backend in some way or another. I don't want or have the time for now to migrate to Qt / KDE ecosystem, besides I don't like it so much but I'd also like to keep Firefox, but I'm clueless on what's going on or how could I fix it.
Does anyone have had this issue in the past? I haven't found anything on the forums or internet, maybe Im just not looking at the right terms.
At this moment I'm running firefox 56.0.2-1 from the extra repo, firefox-developer 58.0b2-1 from the AUR and, and mutter 3.26.2-1 along side gnome-shell 3.26.1 and Budgie 10.4+8+gff09a510-1 from the official package on the community repo. Any help would be highly appreciated.
Thanks
Last edited by jc-arch (2017-12-04 15:46:07)
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What proportion of your system's resources is Firefox using? RAM, total memory, CPU etc. (but especially memory). I don't know how Gnome works, but if the problems are isolated to a single desktop there, I wouldn't recommend switching to KDE. In my experience, Firefox affects everything.
Right now, I'm on a new install without swap and that helps. It helps because the kernel just kills Firefox when necessary. Not an especially satisfactory solution, but actually some improvement. (I'm considering enabling swap, though. As this is very different hardware....)
Yours doesn't sound like a resource issue on the surface, but it would definitely be worth checking to be sure. As far as I can tell, Firefox just eats memory until something kills it. At least, that's what it does here.
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Ah, I have a somewhat resourceful computer, it's almost impossible for Firefox to eat it all. Right now after an hour or two of running it's using about 400MiB out of 24GiB, the processor it's also stable under or around 20% of usage. I have an nVidia GPU using the propietary drivers, but I can't seem how a bad gtk implementation could mess with the graphics driver; and yes, that's what is really curious, the stutters, lags and all are restricted to whatever virtual desktop the browser is. Right now I'm using budgie with 3 virtual desktops in use, if I move between windows on the desktops 2 and 3 everything works fine and smooth, but most of the transitions to desktop 1 (where I have firefox open right now) will result in dropped frames and lag
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I think I found my problem: after running about:support form withing Firefox, I noticed it said open gl and hardware compositing were blocked by platform. After reading further looks like Firefox has still issues to get hardware compositing working, maybe that's what is causing the poor performance, because enabling it makes the same problems more accentuated. So I guess Firefox is a no for me until that gets fixed or I get a whole new computer which has no issues with it.
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I think I found my problem: after running about:support form withing Firefox, I noticed it said open gl and hardware compositing were blocked by platform. After reading further looks like Firefox has still issues to get hardware compositing working, maybe that's what is causing the poor performance, because enabling it makes the same problems more accentuated. So I guess Firefox is a no for me until that gets fixed or I get a whole new computer which has no issues with it.
Is that not normal? I see the same, but I'd expect integrated intel graphics to be supported as well as anything (more-or-less).
Cofnod Penderfynnu
HW_COMPOSITING blocked by default: Acceleration blocked by platform
OPENGL_COMPOSITING unavailable by default: Hardware compositing is disabled
WEBRENDER opt-in by default: WebRender is an opt-in feature
unavailable by runtime: Build doesn't include WebRenderLast edited by cfr (2017-11-17 00:48:44)
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jc-arch wrote:I think I found my problem: after running about:support form withing Firefox, I noticed it said open gl and hardware compositing were blocked by platform. After reading further looks like Firefox has still issues to get hardware compositing working, maybe that's what is causing the poor performance, because enabling it makes the same problems more accentuated. So I guess Firefox is a no for me until that gets fixed or I get a whole new computer which has no issues with it.
Is that not normal? I see the same, but I'd expect integrated intel graphics to be supported as well as anything (more-or-less).
Cofnod Penderfynnu HW_COMPOSITING blocked by default: Acceleration blocked by platform OPENGL_COMPOSITING unavailable by default: Hardware compositing is disabled WEBRENDER opt-in by default: WebRender is an opt-in feature unavailable by runtime: Build doesn't include WebRender
Well I'm not entirely sure. I know two things: I'm running Vivaldi right now, which has hardware acceleration supported and enabled by default, and the same apps and stuff works without the animation lags and issues from before; and two, the nvidia propietary driver sometimes have done funny things in the past, and keeps doing it once in a while specially with wayland implementation so one of those two things could be affecting it overall. Do you have any other ideas on what could be causing it?
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Just a quick update: after running these tests, I decided to give it a go using wayland and Firefox behavior was as good as any chromium based browser, so it may had been a problem wih the Open GL rendering and nVidia driver implementation. Recently both the nvidia driver and Firefox got updated before I gave it a try again so idk which one was the one who fixed it, but right now running Firefox 57.0.1-1 and nvidia 387.34-7 with layers.acceleration.disabled set to false and layers.acceleration.force-enabled set to true in about:config makes it run smooth as butter. CPU usage peaks once in a while, but that's to be expected because it's using multiple cores at once.
I'm marking it as solved, just wish I could've provide a more specific reason.
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