Firefox Slow Performance

Question

I have to say, firefox on ubuntu's performance is attrocious. Very quickly it gets into 100% cpu use (thank god I have multiple cores) and hundreds of megs of ram. Even closing tabs does not help the issue (unless google.com uses supreme amounts of javascript).

On the same machine chromium browser runs lightning smooth. I tried swiftfox, nothing useful there. Is this a common problem? Only recent (past 3.6) versions have even been able to scroll rather smoothly vs choppy performance when using the scroll bar on pages. The performance is getting close to running firefox on a windows xp virtual box vm.

Edit:

OS:

Kubuntu 9.10. Installed Gnome packages for Ubuntu and use those. Upgraded to 10.04.

64bit

Nvidia Proprietary Video Drivers using the Restricted Driver tool.

Hardware:

Core 2 Quad

4gb DDR2 667 ram

7200rpm hdd

Nvidia GeForce 8800

Also note for everyone responding:

The default settings work damn well in windows on the same machine. The performance in Linux is what sucks.

Solution 1

I can't replicate the issues you're detailing - this seems very odd to me (and I'm speaking on the level of testing on multiple machines. This likely may be something particular with your setup.

Here are a few things that can contribute to poorer performance on a machine:

• Clean Install v Multiple Upgrades: I had a similar issue on a workstation that had been upgraded through the years from 5.10 to 9.04 the desktop would randomly restart at odd intervals with no warning - and no log entries. I ended up doing a clean install and the issue went away. Not the best scenario where Troubleshooting triumphed but an example of how older configurations can cause weird issues.
• Hardware: Far less likely - but it may just be an issue with that Firefox release and your setup (drivers, configuration, etc) might be conflicting - which would explain why Swiftfox (a Firefox derivative aimed at increasing performance of the Mozilla tool for Linux) is also responding poorly.

I would search for people exhibiting similar issues with Firefox on setups similar to yours ( You didn't provide anything so I can't really help you further ) but it may be a configuration, compilation issue.

Solution 2

There's a possibility that the sqlite database that Firefox uses becomes too fragmented and reading that could grind the hard drive for a minute or two (especially if you like me have hundreds of bookmarks and never delete history)

The solution to this is the Vacuum Places Improved addon (link text). It defragments your sqlite database, and the startup performance is markedly improved (at least for me it did). Maybe that will work for you.

Comments

[dv3500ea]

Please rephrase as a question. Do you want to know why it is slow? How to fix it? What alternatives there are (you seem to know this already)?

[jon]

All 3. I have no idea why it is slow, or how to fix it. Alternatives are google chrome but I NEED to use firefox in some cases.

[Li Lo]

If you run "firefox -safe-mode" does it still have attrocious performance? It behaves better than Chrome on my system, btw.

[Nishan29]

I had the similar problems with firefox and thunderbird... both where eating much cpu and very slow and I changed to chrome and evolution

[Jorge Castro]

possible duplicate of Why is Firefox too slow?

[jon]

I've already done a "clean" install of firefox. Did a complete removal using apt, even downloaded a few versions as tarballs, they all perform very sluggish for running on a core 2 quad 4 gigs ram, and a 64bit os. As for the OS, I've had these problems with firefox even after a fresh install of ubuntu.

[Li Lo]

Did you remove the "~/.mozilla/firefox" folder? I suspect extensions are at fault.

[jon]

Using same extensions as on windows. History point is BS, I think a 4-core, 4 gig ram computer can handle a bit of cookies/history (and I need cookies). Need flash. Java never runs.

[Javier Rivera]

FF is quite fast even in my netbook (Atom + 2 Gb). You need to give us more information about your setup. Is it as slow when you are running it from a live session?.

[jon]

Have that for a long time :) I know flash is a killer in linux, so thats the first thing I get.

[SergioAraujo]

Improve DNS lookups with dns speed addon: addons.mozilla.org/pt-br/firefox/addon/speed-dns see Author comment: I recently watched on how Chrome browser improved its performance by speeding up their DNS lookups. I wanted to do the same for Firefox and hence this add-on. You can read more about it here - chrome.blogspot.com/2009/12/… and view more here - youtube.com/watch?v=FhDDwmOyRmk