Firefox Performance Poor-ish

Hey guys, I hope this is in the right forum. If not feel free to move it around. I am using my AAO at home, driving a 19 inch monitor@1280x1024. Actually using the computer isn't bad, start up is at normal speeds, pidgin doesn't run half bad, etc etc. However the browsing experience via FF3, which is at the most recent update, isn't too great. Lag precedes loading most pages, and usage in general is not smooth. Image rich pages take far too long to load. Is this because the AAO is being taxed[I don't have too many things running in the background, AM using wireless, yes but I doubt that is the issue], or because, as i mentioned, I am driving the image out over VGA to a 22 inch monitor at a reasonably high res. I think, though, were it the latter, I would have smoothness issues in Windows in general, which I do not. Help a brother out! Using XP, stock out of the box.

 

is this the SSD or the HDD model of AAO?

 

8+8 SSD

 

Try creating a small 100MB Ramdrive and move the firefox cache to it.

 

Please post details or a link on how to do this.

 

The Gavotte Ramdisk was easy to set up and worked well for browser caches, though I discontinued when it didn't improve performace with the HDD - I'd certainly try it with the SSD.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/2 ... 03-server/

You should also look into the about:config tweaks for FF3 - there are more than these but didn't seem to do so much:

FF3 Tweaks: address about:config
network.http.pipelining - false to true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests - 4 to 30
network.http.proxy.pipelining - false to true
network.http.pipelining.ssl - false to true

 

can you elaborate on how, with ramdisk, i'd use it in conjunction with FF? also, I only have a gig of ram, so wouldn't that slow down XP...

 

I found this info
http://www.blogsdna.com/372/21-aboutcon ... efox-3.htm

 

I'm running XP on SSD as well and FF3. With no laggyness or slowdowns. I think the problem is with the stock XP install. I don't know what optimizations Acer has implimented, but there are lots to be done to make XP speedy with the slow SSD. The most important being filesystem should be FAT32 and indexing turned off.... Try to see 1st if these are implemented on the stock Acer XP.

 

in about:config

browser.cache.disk.capacity, i have mine set to 55000 (55MB) but you can choose higher.
browser.cache.disk.parent_directory, I have mine set to Z:\ (ramdisk)
browser.cache.offline.capacity, set same as first (55000) but again, you can decide

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/2 ... 03-server/

That's the same one I use. I only made my ramdisk 70MB but you can decide if you want more or less. You should do the about:config tweaks to limit or else FF will just use all of it and ask for more space.

 

Firefox 3 is a bit "sticky" under XP on the 8Gb SSD

I'm running TinyXP Rev 0.9 with a heap of mods.

You can turn power management off for the Atheros under the device manager, Turn off the FFox cache and do the about:config mods. Thats about as good as it gets

However

I did just try the FFox 3.1 portable beta and it is quicker so don't blame it all on the Acer !

incidentally running FFox from RAM is seriously quicker !

I run all versions with Foxmarks installed

 

Goofball above has it right - you can set the amount of storage on the FF Tools / Options / Advanced / Network box. The essential about:config entry is:

browser.cache.disk.parent_directory - set to Z:\\temp if you name the ramdrive Z.

You should have enough RAM to set 50 to 100 megabytes for the browser cache - my system "idles" using about 400meg RAM - you might look into economizing on start up processes, which are often unnecessary, if you're pinched. The one thing to know about ramdrives is that the contents are flushed when you power the PC down - so it won't save some of the convenience data from sites you visit.

(Re FF3.1 beta - I tried it for several weeks about a month ago, and found it too unstable to rely on. Personally, if I was short on disk space I'd be happy enough with IE8, and the cache on it can be sent to ramdrive as well. I'm running IE8 as the only browser on my oldest XP computer, a 20gig 866mhz Dell with 512k RAM, and it's fine.)

 

Thanks, I have done this.

Firefox does seem faster sometimes, but it still accesses the hard drive a lot, and pauses a lot. Do you think I did something wrong? It created a cache directory on my RAM drive and has created files in it. But it's still accessing the hard drive too much and causing pausing on most page loads.

I have disabled the offline cache which was still being saved on the SSD, and now there is just a short pause on every page load, but it's still there. But 0.5 - 2 second pause is much better than 5-6 seconds.

 

OK, disabled prefetch, disabled phishing/forgery checking. It now accesses the SSD only very briefly, but it IS still acessing it to write little tiny files with every page load.

I could probably live with it now, but I might just change browser.

 

I noticed IE 7 ran a little quicker. an uncle suggested IE8, and I got that and it runs just as quick. Without excessive modifications, are FF3 and netbooks not a match made in heaven?

 

Not really sure if there is a way to completely remove Firefox from writing to the HDD, nor do I even know what it is writing. Perhaps cookies? Not sure.
You could also set up Flashpoint, though you may want to back up your data before you do this to be safe.

 

Even if you put the cache folder on a RAMdisk, FF will still access the SSD. It writes tiny bits of data in the USERS profile folder. Use Flashpoint, been testing it for a couple of days, and it does wonders to the SSD speed. You'll again fall in love with your AAO, hehe.

 

I had the very same issue at a desktop PC at work. There is no reason whatsoever that Firefox should be slow, but it is. It started after I installed SP3 for Windows XP (but that may be a coincidence). Also, The file explorer is very slow and drops network connections at random. After trying 3 times, they normally reconnect.

The symptoms were: some pages took over half a minute to load on that Windows machine, and about a second on Firefox on Linux. IE also took about a second. What was more, you could see that Firefox first loaded the page (showed "done") and would then still hang for a few seconds. I was even given a new machine because of this issue, because both networking and surfing were totally unworkable. That did not help. I already tried to install Firefox again and that did not help either. What did help was dropping the Windows profile and starting a new one. That off course invalidated a lot of programs and wiped all my settings, but surfing and networking went back to a workable state.

I searched a lot on the issue and a lot of hits show people suffering from it, but no answer as to what goes wrong technically. I wish I had the answer on how to repair it. I really do.

 

I found a solution that works for me... after trying (and spending hours tweaking for performance) Firefox, and then Chrome, both of which write to the SSD far too much - even after the cache has been moved to the RamDisk in Firefox's case.

Today I tried Opera, and with no tweaking at all it loads pages blazingly fast - no pausing - I can scroll, click links, type etc. immediately after page load. And the hard drive light only flashes briefly, rather than staying on for seconds at a time. I haven't even relocated the cache to the RamDisk or disabled it - no need. It also starts much faster, and has faster JavaScript. So I'll be using Opera on my netbook from now on.

I'm so used to having a fast desktop computer that I didn't realise how fast Opera was (and there are other things I don't like about it), while I love Firefox so that was fine for me. Chrome is noticeably faster at rendering pages compared to Firefox, but on a netbook with a SSD, hard drive writes are the limiting factor and it seems that Opera wins by a long way.

 

As the old addage goes YMMV . . .

I just tried Opera 9.6 . . . in a word terrible . . much slower and full of pauses while it does god knows what.

Out of interest I gave Safari a try after that and to be fair its the usual overloaded with pretty features affair(I have used Macs for years so I am not a hater) . . . however the page load itself IS by far the fastest I have seen.

I still say Firefox's problems are just that, rather than something we should or should all not be doing with our One's ... just a case of living with it till 3.1 (rebadged to 3.5) is available . . then we can all complain about whats bust with that.