Re: Slow Firefox performance on P4 1.7 GHz 1 GB system
Josh Rehman wrote:
While I do not share this same problem, I think this is an oppurtunity to
learn a little bit about application profiling under Debian, especially
desktop application profiling. When the obvious solutions fail (such as
doing a complete reinstall) I think it would be best to find out exactly
where the application is hanging - is it an inner loop, an I/O operation?
Perhaps this would give a clue as to the next step (e.g. up/downgrade video
drivers, etc.)
I just saw another critical price of information: I looked again at top and
noticed that about 80% if its time is spent in XFree86, when the CPU utilization
is pegged at 100%. My hypothesis is looking more likely, namely that it's an
interaction between the browser and X. I must be connected to some aspect of
that particular web page, like anti-aliased fonts.
That said I don't have a clue as to how to profile something as complex as
Firefox. I found "Prospect" (http://prospect.sourceforge.net/) which looks
promising.
I'm not familiar with X11 internals, or web browsers for that matter, but that
obviously could be very useful here. Something that's more practical for me
would be to try X.org, as another poster proposed. I'm trying to work up the
courage for that, while hoping in the meantime that somebody already running
X.org will report the results, and save me the trouble. :-)
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