Re: Slow Firefox performance on P4 1.7 GHz 1 GB system

[Marty <martyb@ix.netcom.com>]

Jacob S wrote:
> On Sat, 28 May 2005 20:07:18 -0400
> Marty <martyb@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> > Jacob S wrote:
> > > On Sat, 28 May 2005 19:31:00 -0400
> > > Marty <martyb@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > >> Rogério Brito wrote:
> > >> > On May 28 2005, Ionut Georgescu wrote:
> > >> >> On the other hand, the windows versions of Firefox and
> > >Thunderbird > >are > amazingly fast. This is really said ...
> > >> > 
> > >> > Indeed. One thing that has puzzled me is that scrolling in
> > >> > www.macslash.org
> > >> > is simply *slow* on my system while I am using Debian.
> > >> 
> > >> I see it too.  Not only that, but the PageDown key seems to work
> > >> incorrectly.
> > > 
> > > Are ya'll using unstable?
> >
> > Sarge with mozilla-firefox 1.0.4-2
> >
> > I should note, however, that Konqueror and Mozilla also seem slow on
> > that page.  I tried it with IE on WinXP (did't have Firefox there), on
> > a slower machine, and it was *much* faster, so maybe X11 is part of
> > the problem.
>
> Yea, or even compare window managers. I'm using IceWM here. Firefox is
> still back at 1.0.3 on my computer, installed from a tarball. Firefox
> seems to be the same speed as Galeon and Mozilla (only other 2 I use
> with regularity). 
>
> I will also mention that it is very rare for me to use Windows these
> days, so I may not know what 'fast' is for a web browser. (But I tend to
> doubt that. :-)

The difference is measurable, not subjective.  To prove it, I ran top while
slowly scrolling with the mouse pointer on the "slider" on the right margin.
Moving the slider slowly, I was able to max out a 1.5GHz CPU with a Radeon
AGP card.  Slashdot, with a similar-looking page, uses only about
25% percent of the CPU cycles in the same test.  This was with Mozilla,
but as I mentioned before, I get similar results with Firefox.

> HTH,
> Jacob