Bugzilla – Bug 148325
really slow firefox launch...
Last modified: 2006-04-23 00:41:08 UTC
I would really like to help debug this but I have no idea how. I did not install anything else at the moment - firefox 1.5 came pre-loaded. version 1.0 is a bit faster after it has reclaimed the plugins, but still really slow. I have an athlon 3000 and two 160 gb western digital caviar se sata drives (not raid at the moment), with a gigabyte of ram. The process in ksysguard takes up nearly full processor for a few seconds, then drops, then goes back to full, and finally launches. It's usually a lot faster. Things work fine after launching firefox, but for some reason it takes a really long time (maybe 30 seconds compared to about 4 on my slower i386 machine).
maybe that is fontconfig related? bug 143715
perhaps. I can't do it at the moment (it's pretty late here), but I'll try to build firefox from src, with optimizations then if that fails with debug, and I'll download ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/m17n/10.1/RPMS/. I'll try to get back when I find something, but it should be easy to get the same result as I had. It's actually not that bad, about 15 seconds (I guess I'm sort of impatient) but it really should be sooner. Is there any way to set gcc's Os flag (optimize for size)? I am sort of a newbie at this stuff. Also, suse's pretty slow doing all of the laying out prefetch.d things - does that really help? it seems to take up the majority of the boot time. maybe too much optimization really wastes system resources and slows stuff down - perhaps you should think about letting Linux's kernel take care of hard drive / file buffering. And another side note - is there a patch for the online update or do we wait for alpha 4? It's not working here. I actually got the nvidia drivers to work manually with a bit of patching. Thanks everyone
ok this is what I get when i try to build from source /usr/lib64/gcc/x86_64-suse-linux/4.1.0/../../../../x86_64-suse-linux/bin/ld: deflate.o: relocation R_X86_64_PC32 against `memcpy@@GLIBC_2.2.5' can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC /usr/lib64/gcc/x86_64-suse-linux/4.1.0/../../../../x86_64-suse-linux/bin/ld: final link failed: Bad value configure file mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser ac_add_options --enable-application=browser ac_add_options --enable-optimize ac_add_options --enable-debug that's for firefox 1.5.0.1, I tried it without the last line and without the last two flags. just a reminder I am on x84_64 and I don't know if this happens on other systems.
Those are known issues and if you want to build from source you should make sure that you use the minimal set of needed patches from the source RPM. I'm pretty sure that it's fontconfig related. I can't comment on the preloading and online update stuff. You should ask this on some opensuse mailing-list.
I don't know about debugging, preloading and all that other technical stuff. All I know is that: FIREFOX TAKES FOREVER TO LOAD ON X86_64 !!! (at least on SuSE 10.1) When I made the switch from x86 I thought that apps would be quicker on x86_64. I hope that the problem is really solved. Looking forward to SUSE 10.1 final.
OOhh and one more thing... That fontconfig thing was solved a while ago, before the release of beta 8. The problem still exists in beta 8. Gnome is slow. Firefox is slow. That's one heck of a nightmare. Only on x86_64
What's the status of this in the light of 10.1 and SLED10?
I'm not sure if it is a generic problem. Has anyone else seen this behaviour on x86-64?
ok it's fixed in the new problem; probably the fonts as some people suggested. in any case it's fine.
sorry i was sort of spaced out...I mean the new version of opensuse (rc1).