Arch Linux

jaap aarts

Member

Registered: 2017-09-04

Posts: 30

[Solved] Firefox performance dropped a lot the last 3 months

Hello, this is a bit of a weird thing that happened.
It is fixed now, however I cant really find the root cause for this.

A couple months ago my FF performance dropped heavily, like really badly, minute long page load times etc. On my laptop with the same FS and also up-to-date everything kept working fine.
After some profiling, the FF dev team noted that a lot of time was spend in fsync. Which is weird, my SSD isnt full, no errors in dmesg, other applications work fine and read/writing to files seemed fine too.

Then today, after I updated this weeks updated packages and rebooted, everything was fine. As if nothing ever happened.

I had problems with another application that wouldn't launch due to sqlite problems, and that also works now.

I looked at the list of updated packages, but nothing that stands out as impacting fsync performance. Except the linux kernel ofc, so I checked its changelog from 5.14.3 to 5.14.7.
I found a bunch of f2fs fixes and patches. So I downgraded linux+headers to pre-f2fs-patch, but nothing changed, everything was still fast.

Is anyone aware of any patches or changes in other packages that could cause this? I use f2fs with an nvme ssd. RW perf not affected, seemingly only fsync.

Last edited by jaap aarts (2021-09-26 14:46:55)

Lone_Wolf

Forum Moderator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 11,982

Re: [Solved] Firefox performance dropped a lot the last 3 months

Sounds similar to https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=269774 where several people reported problems with firefox on f2fs home partitions and solved it by fsck'ing them.

Last edited by Lone_Wolf (2021-09-26 10:40:35)

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

jaap aarts

Member

Registered: 2017-09-04

Posts: 30

Re: [Solved] Firefox performance dropped a lot the last 3 months

huh, I guess ill just mark this as solved, I cant verify if this was actually the reason. My issue also started long before that thread was created.

jaap aarts

Member

Registered: 2017-09-04

Posts: 30

Re: [Solved] Firefox performance dropped a lot the last 3 months

Thanks for linking that btw! I did google when this initially came up, but nothing came up on the arch forums (or elsewhere). I didnt think people would start having the same issue months after I got it.