FireFox is slow, please help

EAD · 03-09-2006, 11:57 AM

Hii, I am using FireFox 1.5.01 and PClinuxOS and kernel 2.6.15 and my FireFox is very slow!
When open some Tabs, the system start to get slow until it finish load them and it pretty hard to work like this.
I will like to get some help.
I even removed it and clean all of it and then reinstall it and still it slow
Can someone help me here please?

zeitounator · 03-09-2006, 12:10 PM

Did you keep the same profile when you tried to reinstall ?

If not, backup your profile directory and try to launch firefox with a clean one. If problems are gone, you've got your solution. Then you just need to copy over what you need (bookmarks, passwords...) in the newly created profile from the old one.

scottmorris · 03-09-2006, 01:06 PM

As zeitounator says, you can try a clean profile. In your home directory (with Firefox not running), rename the .mozilla directory to something like .mozilla.old and then run Firefox again. This actually helped me recently fix that exact problem. My Firefox was crawling and it drove me crazy. I moved my .mozilla folder to .mozilla.old and Firefox worked wonderfully after that. Then, I just copied my bookmarks, etc., over to the newly created .mozilla folder and everything has been great ever since then.

EAD · 03-09-2006, 02:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by scottmorris

As zeitounator says, you can try a clean profile. In your home directory (with Firefox not running), rename the .mozilla directory to something like .mozilla.old and then run Firefox again. This actually helped me recently fix that exact problem. My Firefox was crawling and it drove me crazy. I moved my .mozilla folder to .mozilla.old and Firefox worked wonderfully after that. Then, I just copied my bookmarks, etc., over to the newly created .mozilla folder and everything has been great ever since then.

I don't save my profile.
Like I have said I did a clean one.
Can you help me with this?

sunpascal · 03-10-2006, 04:50 AM

are you using kde?

EAD · 03-10-2006, 09:14 AM

Yes using KDE, but even in others it is still slow

tomdkat · 03-10-2006, 10:02 AM

When Firefox is running slow, open a terminal window and issue the "top" command to see system performance information. Press capital 'M' (shift-M) to sort by memory usage and see what sorts to the top. Also, make note of how much swap is in use.

Firefox can take HUGE amounts of memory and if your system starts thrashing, performance will suck BIG time.

I know Firefox will run like a dog for me sometimes and usually when I'm under severe memory shortage and swap is in heavy use (like 100MB+ of swap).

I've upgraded to 512MB of RAM and for my "application mix" it tends to work out better, but I would see what your memory usage situation is when you notice sluggish performance.

Peace...

scottmorris · 03-10-2006, 10:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tomdkat

Press capital 'M' (shift-M) to sort by memory usage and see what sorts to the top. Also, make note of how much swap is in use.

'top' is a great suggestion. Another thing to check is how much of the CPU it is using... this can be done with capital 'P' (shift-P) to sort by CPU usage.

Can you use other browsers without problems?

Do you have a browser theme installed? I had a really slick theme on my Firefox, and it made it absolutely crawl. Once I reset it back to the original theme, that sped it up significantly.

EAD · 03-10-2006, 04:05 PM

It doesn't use much CPU time, I don't think here is the problem
and ideas?

tomdkat · 03-10-2006, 04:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by EAD

It doesn't use much CPU time

It's not CPU time, but CPU percentage. How about memory use?

In fact, see if you can highlight the 'top' output and paste it into this thread so we can see the numbers.

Do you have many tabs open when you experience the performance problem? You say you open "some" tabs, but can you provide an actual number of tabs?

Peace...

EAD · 03-11-2006, 01:34 AM

here this is my top:

top - 09:32:40 up 6 min, 1 user, load average: 0.43, 0.22, 0.11
Tasks: 71 total, 2 running, 69 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 6.0% user, 1.9% system, 0.0% nice, 81.1% idle, 11.0% IO-wait
Mem: 776412k total, 236576k used, 539836k free, 9944k buffers
Swap: 1550232k total, 0k used, 1550232k free, 138276k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2691 guest 22 0 66460 35m 18m R 99.9 4.7 0:07.43 mozilla-firefox
1 root 16 0 1548 504 452 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.68 init

Can you tell me now what shell I do?
this slowing problem really upset me

Maxei · 03-11-2006, 01:53 AM

Yep. It's true. Firefox is fast but not the fastest web browser. Indeed I became so frustrated by the slowlines of Firefox when opening multiple tabs (which seems to be due to a bad handling of memory (i have close to 1 Gb of memory and still two tabs opening simultaneously compete fiercely with disastrous slowliness).

Solution: I switched to Opera. The problem was solved. Really. Opera does the best job at handling multiple tabs, without slowing to each other. Because of that, now I use 99% of the Time Opera. The other 1% is for Mozilla because Opera has other problems in my system, such as not being able to open pages based on Java (this can be fixed but I havent tried).

Oh yes, surfing the web with Opera is like a breeze. Try it. and believe me: I do NOT work for that company

EAD · 03-11-2006, 02:54 AM

amm I also like Opera, but I got used to FireFox, I know opera is faster but firefox on my linux is very slow open multi tabs, while in windows it works very nice, how come?
Can some one help me solve the streng problem?

alaios · 03-11-2006, 03:17 AM

IO have the similar problem using firefox i have 1gb of ram and it runs really slow
Firefox seems to conserve more memory even from kde (Its the first line when i sort top results using M)
6215 alaios 15 0 121m 58m 21m S 12.3 5.7 11:26.78 firefox-bin

EAD · 03-11-2006, 04:41 AM

amm, so what is the soultion?
Can there be a way runing it fast?