Opera 9.23 performance woes
 

12 Oct 2007
Culver City, CA

Opera 9.23 running under Slackware 12 (dropline GNOME) on a 1.7GHz Dell Latitude D800 (500 MB ram; 40 GB hard drive). Absolute dog. Thrashing my hard disk.
I usually have as many as a dozen tabs open. If the system goes to sleep, the HD thrashing when trying to wake up can go on for 10-20 minutes (no joke). 96% memory used; 50% swap used. Often CPU will max out with an Opera pluginwrapper thread taking 97% CPU... forever.
I've been a very loyal Opera lover for 8 years, incl under OS/2. No other browser behaves so badly on this machine (Epiphany, Firefox). I have similar problems with Opera 9.23 on an old slow (800 MHz) Dell desktop, but I put it down to old slow hardware. Even there, Firefox or Konqueror or Epiphany are much more stable, efficient.
Opera had always been the thriftiest and snappiest browser, besides having the best user interface. I would not have thought this 1.7 GHz Dell would be an odd machine. What can be wrong? What can I reconfigure to let me continue using Opera?

What shows if you strace it?

strace...
 

Thank you for the suggestion. I haven't tried that, but will as soon as I can. Is there something in particular you have in mind that I should look for?
==MAS

No. Just wondering what it spends cycles on. I've been using 9.23 for a while now and there's nothing that makes me wanna ditch it.

You mentioned operapluginwrapper. Are you visiting sites with a lot of flash? That can do it sometimes. Flash player 9 isn't officically supported under Opera on Linux, and I've found that it sometimes doesn't play well.

If you're not viewing a lot of flash, you could try just disabling plugins. If that doesn't work, you could try renaming your ~/.opera directory and letting Opera create a new one. I've been using Opera for years and I've found that clearing out the configuration like that sometimes clears up weird problems. You can always move back the important files (opera6.adr, wand.dat, etc.) if that helps.

Got a similar problem on an old Ubuntu box. The 'thrashing the disk' is the problem and 'poor opera performance' is the symptom (even if it is caused by, amongst others, Opera's memory usage).

I used to work with up to 50 (at which point, the tab icons get kind of small). No more. Can't go beyond a dozen now.

It happens for me whichever browser I use. It hapens a bit more quickly with Opera than with Firefox or Konq, presumably because I tend to use more open tabs with Opera than with the others. It started for me just after a system update and my suspicion is that I've got an underlying library that has a memory leak, but that was also roughly the time that I started using RSS feeds more heavily.

I've used akregator for RSS feeds now and I don't run unnecessary programs, but that only helps a little. I still have to log out and log in every three or four days or less (previously, I'd log out and in every month or three - that is completely impossible now). These days, I can't live without RSS feeds and, like you, I prefer Opera.

The suggestion has been made to me that there is a memory leak in X, but as the person who made that suggestion was using a different distro and a different X, I'm not sure. My feeling is that an underlying library is actually leaking and that, maybe, it has something to do with two cpus andwhether all the libraries are 'threadsafe'.

If I run 'ksysguard' with a really slow update interval (~100 seconds), I can actually see the memory usage slowly growing over 6-8 hours. Once I've got to 500+M swap out of 1G total, logging out and in is becoming inevitable.

So far, I haven't taken this very seriously as this box is due an update. I just haven't decided on Debian(Etch)/Kubuntu 7.10/SuSE 10.3 yet. Maybe, I have to try them all. Of course, that assumes the update makes it go away...