Firefox sloooooooooow
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- Nairn0
My startup time was beginning to bother me yesterday, so I deleted my entire browsing history, so there's (much) less for FF to index when it boots up. It's a shame I'm so impatient, as it's really a very good feature.
- benfal990
Anyways, Firefox is slowing down since a couple months. Chrome is a serious competitor, he's fast as hell.
- beetsy0
Works fine for me, but im getting used to chrome now
- beetsy0
Only issue I have with chrome is that I find the find in text function doesnt always work for pdf documents :-(
- kgvs720
Does anyone else have high memory usage in FF 3.0. I'm talking 428 Mb of memory. I think the culprit is Google Gears, but FF has always been known for being a memory hog. Hopefully they can learn a thing or two about Chrome.
- ukit0
Did you guys see the article posted earlier?
"That forum thread revealed what the true cause was of this disk thrashing and delay at startup. I have to warn you though. If you're a developer, your software engineering fire will die a little when you read the true cause and from then on you will have to fight off thoughts of giving up development altogether and apply for a job in marketing or HR. So what was it, what's the cause of this slowness? It's NSS. What? The Network Security System. It turns out that NSS needs to do all kinds of encryption and other security related tasks (which seems kind of logical), and for that it needs random numbers. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, it kind of does.
True random numbers are hard to produce, because in a computer system, nothing is really random, it all is a result of some action which was a result of some action etc. etc. The clever boys and girls of the NSS team had to crack this problem: how to get 'true' random numbers which are as random as possible? Instead of using the randomization functionality of the underlying operating system (which has this feature build-in as every TCP stack for example needs it), they did what Mozilla in general always does: they re-invented the wheel. Nothing against re-inventing stuff, don't get me wrong, not every wheel is as equal as the other one, and you can never have enough good, re-invented, shiny wheels. Though, the downside of re-inventing wheels is that along the way you can't make mistakes, it has to be better than the previous invented wheels. No-one wants to use your square new wheel for example.
To solve the problem of the randomization, the NSS team came up with something clever, something so great, that no-one else had ever thought of that before: they decided to read the files in all possible temp folders on disk with multiple threads so these files can be used as seeds for the randomization. Brilliant. Temp folders! Why hasn't anyone else thought of using a disk-based resource for random number generation! I mean, these folders change every couple of milliseconds, have immediate access, no latency to read their contents and are never filled to the brim with useless cruft!
That is, if you're on the NSS team. In the outside world, things are a tad different. You see, Firefox v3.5 reads the Internet Explorer Cache and the central Windows temp folder in your user profile, through its NSS subsystem. Not only is it, in my humble opinion, not done to read another application's caches or temp folders, it's also amazingly ignorant towards the real bottlenecks of our modern computers: hard-drives. If you're using a virus-scanner which is set to paranoia mode, this whole temp folder traversal by NSS will be even slower because every file accessed will be scanned by the virus scanner. Over and over and over again..."
F*cking nerds...
- utopian0
Are you sure it is not QBN? QBN is extremely slow at times, I am using Safari.
- janne760
yes, very sloooooooooow startup here as well..
- comicsans0
Another performance issue with Firefox 3.x is its use of sqlite databases to hold various things like your history. These get fragmented over time and can result in major slowdowns. The following link shows how you can speed database access by performing regular maintenance. And yes, this should not be necessary
http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/…
Mac users will have sqlite3 installed but this trick requires command line magic
- detritus0
FF 3.5.1, available now, apparently addresses the slow startup problem.
- ********0
3.5 seems a bit faster to me
- benfal990
as soon as Chrome get Delicious toolbar, I'll switch.
- benfal990
i've found this but can't manage to install it...
Delicious Toolbar for Chrome
http://groups.google.com/group/c…