[Solved] Very slow kde.org in firefox

Leonid.I · 2010-10-24 15:25:32

Hi,

This morning I loaded http://www.kde.org in firefox and was amazed by it's performace, or more precisely, by the lack therof while loading the gif animation: X uses >1 core and the desktop (xfce, no compositing) becomes completely unresponsive (it took me ~ 1min to get to terminal and kill ff). I have nvidia geforce 4 mx440 with nouveau, i686.

Is it just me, or anyone else also experinces this?

Last edited by Leonid.I (2011-01-18 22:40:52)

karol · 2010-10-24 17:10:42

Are other browsers are loading that page OK? geforce 4 mx440 isn't the most powerful card IIRC.

Edit: Tested with firefox on my nvidia fx 5500, nouveau, i686 - no problems.

Last edited by karol (2010-10-24 17:23:21)

Leonid.I · 2010-10-24 17:47:27

karol wrote:

Are other browsers are loading that page OK? geforce 4 mx440 isn't the most powerful card IIRC.
Edit: Tested with firefox on my nvidia fx 5500, nouveau, i686 - no problems.

Thx for the reply!

Midori is better (X takes only ~50% CPU).

I mean, there has to be something wrong with the animations at KDE website, because since when does it take an nvidia fx to simply load the page (...this could also mean that I shouldn't even hope to run kde ). Besides, I don't quite understand the relevance of the GPU, since nouveau anyway uses only software rendering (that's why X takes CPU cycles).

Are you sure, you tested animations (sometimes you have to wait for them to start playing)?..

karol · 2010-10-24 17:59:19

Do you mean the big banner-like animation near the top of the page that say: "Experience freedom" and "Invest in freedom"?

I'm not a hardware guru, but I think that nouveau uses your card and not the main cpu, because my Sempron 2300+ (clocked at nearly 1.6 GHz) with nvidia fx 5500 and nouveau is 2-3 better in loading graphics-heavy pages than my P4 2 GHz with an onboard intel graphics. The second computer despite having quite a powerful cpu brings the system to a halt.

Leonid.I · 2010-10-24 19:31:23

karol wrote:

Do you mean the big banner-like animation near the top of the page that say: "Experience freedom" and "Invest in freedom"?

Yes, exactly. In their page src, I found this

jQuery.preLoadImages("/images/teaser/450.png","/images/teaser/jointhegame.gif",
                                 "/media/images/plasmaMenu/menubox_top.png", 
                                 "/media/images/plasmaMenu/menubox_body.png",
                                 "/media/images/plasmaMenu/menubox_bottom.png");
$('.teaser').cycle({
                fx: 'fade',
                timeout: 6000,
                speed: 500,
                next : $('#next'),
                prev : $('#previous')
            });

which seems to be responsible for switching the images every 6000 ms. However, I don't know what "speed" means... is it too large?

karol wrote:

I'm not a hardware guru, but I think that nouveau uses your card and not the main cpu, because my Sempron 2300+ (clocked at nearly 1.6 GHz) with nvidia fx 5500 and nouveau is 2-3 better in loading graphics-heavy pages than my P4 2 GHz with an onboard intel graphics. The second computer despite having quite a powerful cpu brings the system to a halt.

No, I didn't mean that GPU is completely irrelevant, just the fact that nouveau utilizes only a little fraction of the modern card potential, which means that an old card is not going to be much worse, than a new one (although it should be).

Also, from my experience, I can say that semprons are usually faster than comparable-generation P4s. For example, sempron 1.8GHz+128 kb L2 on my laptop renders eps figures noticeably faster than a P4 3.2GHz+1Mb L2 desktop. Both, of course, run Arch

karol · 2010-10-24 22:01:57

OK, now I experience exactly the thing as you - 100% utilization of cpu by X. I need to kill firefox to work again. The trick is to watch the animation: if you scroll down that page or switch to another app everything will be OK.
The first "loop" of the animation runs OK here, then hilarity ensues: the next loops take twice as long to run and when I switch to another tag (I use dwm) and then back to firefox, the only thing that I can see is that sloooowly animated gif, no menus, no taskbars, not even the rest of the page is rendered. I see the gif ontop of the contents of the previous tag instead of firefox taking the whole screen.

karol · 2011-01-16 20:10:06

As of firefox 3.6.13-1 everything is alright here.
How are the things on your side?

Leonid.I · 2011-01-17 16:32:59

karol wrote:

As of firefox 3.6.13-1 everything is alright here.
How are the things on your side?

Thanks for the info

Yes, with 3.6.13, the animation is smooth on accelerated cards, and is acceptable on older ones (geforce 4). I am not sure whether this is the browser or the driver, though. Also, konqueror is OK too.

I should probably mark this as solved...

Arch Linux

#1 2010-10-24 15:25:32

[Solved] Very slow kde.org in firefox

#2 2010-10-24 17:10:42

Re: [Solved] Very slow kde.org in firefox

#3 2010-10-24 17:47:27

Re: [Solved] Very slow kde.org in firefox

#4 2010-10-24 17:59:19

Re: [Solved] Very slow kde.org in firefox

#5 2010-10-24 19:31:23

Re: [Solved] Very slow kde.org in firefox

#6 2010-10-24 22:01:57

Re: [Solved] Very slow kde.org in firefox

#7 2011-01-16 20:10:06

Re: [Solved] Very slow kde.org in firefox

#8 2011-01-17 16:32:59

Re: [Solved] Very slow kde.org in firefox

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