Call for Snappy Help: Looking for a lots-of-tabs sessions with lag
January 11th, 2012 by tglek
I have been working under assumption that the browser gets less snappy as more tabs are opened. This increases the chances of having an ill-behaved website in the background. An ill-behaved tab (or a couple of them) can in theory ruin scrolling, typing, clicking, etc in active tabs. However I do not have anything behind anecdotal evidence on this. There are bugs on specific websites in bugzilla, but it would be nice to get them mixed into a realistic set of tabs.
Would someone be willing to contribute a list of webpages they use often that cause Firefox to lag (maybe a session restore file?)? I am a low-tab person myself, so I can’t easily reproduce this. Please make sure that Firefox is slow with your list of tabs even when all addons are disabled, include a description of slowness encountered.
32 Responses to “Call for Snappy Help: Looking for a lots-of-tabs sessions with lag”
I always find articles on theverge.com cause Firefox to be a bit slow. Watching HTML5 videos on the site is also a bit choppy.
Back when I was using FF regularly, I had a session with 900 tabs (*cough*), and basically *everything* was slow. That is, the whole thing would freeze regularly for ~1s every 15s or so, and the rest wasn’t smooth either. The only way I was able to keep it up was by using BarTab anyway, so 99% of those tabs weren’t even loaded. I have later pruned it to maybe half the size, and it was significantly better, but there’s still a very noticeable slowdown at anything approaching 100 tabs or more.
I don’t use FF regularly anymore, but I could give restoring that session a go and try seeing how it behaves with no extensions. Hopefully my new 8GB laptop will be able to handle the load of 450 or 900 non-delayed tabs. But it will take me some time to sort it out either way.
P.S. I’m both forgetful and rather busy at the moment, so if you don’t hear from me in a few days, and don’t have any other offers in the meantime, please poke me with a reminder
I’m not sure if I want to share the entirety of tabs I use, but..
Open a few 9gag tabs, a few Cracked.com articles, have a few tabs of active Twitter accounts. Try to leave the Twitter stuff running for a bunch of hours.
I have this lag and it feels like it’s getting worse in recent releases, even as Firefox’s other memory footprint issues have subsided.
The most noticeable symptoms are long lags when switching tabs (sometimes a second or more), or popping a context menu, or starting scrolling.
In the past, this lag seemed most associated with a few overactive background tabs, those I strongly suspected of being JS-GC or AJAX-heavy. Sometimes, then, closing those likely suspects would help. Nowadays, not so much (or I can’t figure out the culprits).
To that end, even without a sandboxed process-per-thread model, if there was *any* counter readout that served as a valid proxy for the ‘activity’ of a tab — allocations? DOM mutations? graph-from-root-size? AJAX connections? — it could be a great help, almost as good as the Chrome ‘Task Manager’. It’s otherwise so hard to find the culprits.
How can I create a ‘session restore file’ to help?
I don’t have Flash installed for Firefox. I do use NoScript with a long whitelist. I have Firebug installed and often active in a tab or two but even when choosing ‘disable all panels’ the lagginess continues.
Gordon,
I’m looking for sessionstore.js in your profile directory. To find the profile directory see
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Profiles.
Note, I prefer sessionrestore files that we can deploy on our testing infrastructure, so do not post your tab restore data if it contains sensitive data.
Do you care about lag while a group of tabs loads, or only lag with all the tabs completely loaded? I have a bookmark folder of ~25 bookmarks for which “open all in tabs” causes the browser to become nearly nonresponsive until most of the tabs have loaded, but once they all load I see no lag.
No, I do not care page-loading lag at this time. That’s a whole other issue and will require a different fix.
I can second that browsing on The Verge with >15 tabs can become quite slow on my i7/8GB/SSD machine.
Multiple tabs with flash content (i.e. Youtube 720p) also tend to slow down tab switching considerably.
Right now, I have 12 open tabs with random sites. Switching to a tab ranges from “immediate” (pure HTML pages) to “almost a second delay” (PHP and image heavy sites). Coincidentally, this very page takes the longest right now.
What possible reason would someone have to need 900 tabs open at one time? Pack-rat much? Who even has 900 websites they visit? Bookmark some of those bad boys and you can always find it again if needed.
I dont care how fast or how much memory my computer had, I would expect anything to slow down if I had 900 tabs open on my computer. I guarantee Firefox devs never originally developed the tab functionality with people in mind who would open 900 of them.
I think the most ive ever opened at once was around 30 and I was freaking out about how many i had open and how i couldnt find what i wanted easily.
Correction from last post: I meant Javascript-heavy, not PHP-heavy sites.
People have indicated most of the problems that I have (laptop, win7 at home and pc station, winXP at work, both running ff9 stable):
- switching tabs/scrolling gets slow over time, particularly when more than 8-10 tabs are open.
- playing youtube video, particularly when few youtube pages are open, is kind of nightmare.
- I experience the same issues as indicated by Gordon Mohr.
- facebooking, particularly when few facebook pages are open, makes FF slow.
I can provide you with more information about the webpages I regularly visit as well as “slowliness” I experience. Just email and let me know how I can be helpful.
R.
@Seth: sure, 900 is pathological even for me, but I regularly hit 100+ tabs with very moderate browsing. It’s just the way I browse. Also I can easily open 100 new tabs I will actually look at in a single session, since a big part of my browsing is moderating a very active site with user-submitted content. And FF definitely does start slowing down at 100 or even 50 tabs.
@tglek: hmm, that’s unfortunate, my session is full of my browsing habits, which I could probably share with one person, but am not really comfortable having it as a part of the public build infrastructure.
I am a heavy tab user, how do i copy my current sessions, just copy they file? I am under the impressions that i open all the tabs, close Firefox, then copy it? Right?
Another simple example would be if you open any few tabs, and click Tabs from Other Computer, 50% of time if would causes a lag or freeze or up to 2 – 3 seconds.
And where should i send the files to?
I have recorded a few previous session that i have specifically testes in both Firefox and Chrome. And Chrome does not lag at all.
As an eBay seller, I can confirm that many eBay pages hangs the whole Firefox for several sec. It mainly includes:
Selling Manager Pro Summary
Selling Manager Pro -> Active
Currently I am on:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0
But this behaviour was also on previous versions.
Does it have to be tabs or do multiple windows count?
This is my list of tabs I open simultaneously when I notice I haven’t basically to stay up to date with my internet life.
1:Google reader
2:Gmail
3:Yahoo Mail
4:3-4 Blogs with high quality background in each (ruins scrolling in active tab)
4:Facebook
5:twitter
and YouTube.
BBC news pages load very slow and cpu intensive compared to other ones I use, often the browser hangs. Example feed: http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/europe/rss.xml
How about the testcase from this bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682638
?
Jools, trying to focus in on tabs.
Rackshith, do you experience lag after those tabs loads or just during loading?
I regularly have 8-10 pinned tabs and another 10-15 tabs open and I don’t have any issues with the browser or any of the tabs unless memory usage gets up around 1.5GB. Once that happens (usually because of an extension not releasing images from memory), the whole browser goes to hell and I’ve got to restart it. But now that I’ve identified the problem extensions and disabled them, I haven’t had any issues in about 24-36 hours.
Try this:
https://github.com/DmitryBaranovskiy/raphael/blob/master/raphael.core.js
Both because after the tab load is complete there is a spike in memory used by Firefox and during tab load there is lags I experience because it loads as single process and to add the essence I’ve also force enabled kinds of hardware acceleration on my blacklisted hardware (Intel much?). But I believe these problems vary by user and mostly depends on their hardware so the symptoms wont be common for everyone/testers. Its hard to solve
Turning D2D and the forced hardware/layer acceleration OFF significantly reduces the lags by about 80% I assume because I tried the similar with another non modified profile and it ran comparatively smoother. But it is getting better with newer releases. I use Nightly UX and it performs better than the current RTP. Here’s my sessionstore.js http://www.mediafire.com/?nhp16zvb8o2cl36
Having multiple tabs from this site restored at every startup (more noticeably,the ones containing many large images,in addition to single images displayed each in its own tab) definitely impacts Firefox, bad scrolling issues are undoubtedly on top of the list,but also switching between tabs is kinda slow,typing is occasionally delayed and the browser clearly loses its responsiveness.This oddly happens with on-demand tab loading checked and reasonable amounts of memory usage displayed in about:memory,while OTOH I’ve noticed the BarTab addon apparently mitigates the issue.
sorry, I meant this site
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/
Hers is another sessionstore.js http://www.mediafire.com/?g5le5v8j9tjbcut
I can’t provide a sessionstore.js right now but I’ll see if I can work on prepping one. My sessionstore normally reaches a few megabytes in a fortnight of normal use.
1) Pin Gmail & Google Reader as app tabs
2) Browse through a thousand items in both
3) Profit, or enjoy an instant multi-megabyte sessionstore.js
I’ve discovered that closing & re-opening/re-pinning these two app tabs shrinks my sessionstore.js file back to a few hundred kb. So it’s not an unrecoverable data leak, it just seems to store a lot of data with these tabs. Maybe there could be a 128kb-per-tab limit?
For me, if a page is JavaScript heavy, FF ALWAYS lags. Chrome doesn’t. It’s a shame, though as FF is a great browser!
What’s your definition of “lots of tabs”? I’m running about 40 right now, and I’m getting a fair bit of stuttering… Unfortunately, it takes at least a couple days of browsing to get to this point, so I’m not sure how useful my session store would be.
Looking through about:telemetry, my average GC_MS is 232ms right now, so I’m betting that’s where most of the stutters come from.
And I just noticed the CYCLE_COLLECTOR telemetry, with my CYCLE_COLLECTOR average at 474.6 (ms, I believe?) A whopping 85% of them didn’t collect anything at all, either. Now I’m really looking forward to those cycle collection optimizations mentioned on Jan 12th…
In my opinion, the main slowdown is caused by the javascript that keeps running in every single background tab.
I already talked about that on .platform and know that you Mozilla dev believe you can’t stop javascript in background tabs without creating huge compatibility problems.
But now I have a way to do just that, stop firefox, restart it, all tabs that I have not actually accessed since the restart are not active, and use no ressource, run no javascrip. And in practice, it doesn’t cause any problem, it’s just much better.