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Slow Firefox performance on P4 1.7 GHz 1 GB system



I'm trying out Firefox again, and am dogged by slow performance,
particularly on startup and window/tab operations.  The browser lags
noticeably, a feature it shares with Mozilla and a couple other apps
(most noticably OpenOffice.org).   All of them share the characteristic
of opening to an initially unresponsive window which tends to show  an
image of other desktop elements.  Screenshot:

    http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/Images/ffx-dead-window.png

The terminal window (showing this email in progress) is duplicated over
the browser window.  Note that the titlebar shows both blue and grey --
the grey bit is the part that's showing on the Firefox window.

Delays are noticed when:

  - Opening new tabs.
  - Loading new tabs in background.
  - Opening new windows.
  - Closing tabs.
  - Launching the preferences dialog (Edit => Preferences).

Delays are up to 5-10 seconds, or longer, for actions to complete.

I'd chalked this up to Firefox itself being fundamentally slow, but
noticed on other systems that these issues don't appear to be present.



A few bits of extraneous data:

  - P4 1.7 GHz 1 GiB RAM.

  - As the wmmon dockapp shows, memory is roughly 50% free, and there is
    effectively no swap usage.  'vmstat' shows no swapping during
    actions.

  - Graphics are XFree86 v4, with the 'sis' driver, on a "SIS 6325"
    video card.  From 'lspci':

        0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated
        Systems [SiS] 65x/M650/740 PCI/AGP VGA Display Adapter

  - Current display resolution is set to 1280x960.

  - Stock Firefox theme.  Numerous extensions loaded.  System load is
    ~0.5.


Suggestions?  Anyone else having similar issues?


Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    This suggests a more troubled future for Gnome than I had imagined.
    - Chip Salzenberg, on GNOME developer attitudes
      http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2004-January/008588.html

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