[kwlug-disc] Firefox resource usage

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

>From another thread ...

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 7:03 PM Chris Frey <cdfrey at foursquare.net> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 12:46:43PM -0500, Doug Moen wrote:
> > Sounds like Debian is too slow and bloated for this hardware. I bet
> > that Plan 9 would really fly on it. Plan 9 is from the right era and
> > there's been no large scale effort to make it a thousand times slower
> > and require a thousand times as much memory, as has happened with
> > Linux distros.
>
> This may have been in jest, but boy howdy, is it real.
>
> I'm still running Debian Buster 10, and recently due to security updates
> and end-of-life requiring the change, Firefox was updated from 78.15esr
> to 91.5esr.  Watching youtube is now a 100% CPU grinding, fan blowing,
> choppy video, sluggish UI affair on my poor Thinkpad T510.
>
> I kinda long for that bygone era.
>

I am on a Thinkpad 450. No idea when it was made. BIOS date is 2018, but
that may be an update that the previous owner applied, or I did apply it
after I bought it.

Model number is 20BUS6150U
CPU is Intel Core i5-5300U CPU @ 2.30GHz

And I am on Xubuntu 20.04 64bit, with Firefox 96.0.

I definitely had issues with Firefox's memory usage, which was a problem
even
with 12GB of RAM. Turns out the issue was too many Firefox windows opened.
Once I bookmarked the tabs in several windows and closed them, the laptop
never goes to swap.

Here is dstat (again)

$ dstat --noupdate -tclpydr 10 | cat
----system---- --total-cpu-usage-- ---load-avg--- ---procs--- ---system--
-dsk/total- --io/total-
     time     |usr sys idl wai stl| 1m   5m  15m |run blk new| int   csw |
read  writ| read  writ
31-01 21:09:48|  5   1  94   0   0|0.32 0.93 1.16|  0   0 1.3| 838  1918 |
  0    19k|   0  1.00
31-01 21:09:58| 12   2  86   0   0|0.42 0.93 1.16|  0   0 0.6|1559  3998 |
  0    21k|   0  3.60
31-01 21:10:08| 17   3  80   0   0|0.51 0.93 1.16|2.0   0 1.4|1947  4579 |
  0  3686B|   0  0.30
31-01 21:10:18| 17   3  81   0   0|0.51 0.92 1.15|  0   0 1.4|1816  4434 |
  0    20k|   0  0.60
31-01 21:10:28|  5   1  94   0   0|0.43 0.89 1.14|  0   0 1.3| 891  2082 |
  0    21k|   0  2.80
31-01 21:10:38|  7   1  92   0   0|0.36 0.86 1.12|5.0   0 1.1| 940  2489 |
  0   186k|   0  7.10

Then I start Firefox

31-01 21:10:48| 44   7  49   0   0|1.03 0.98 1.16|1.0   0 3.5|3307    16k|
  0    17k|   0  0.60
31-01 21:10:58| 31   4  65   0   0|0.87 0.94 1.15|2.0   0 0.8|2382    12k|
  0   138k|   0  8.90
31-01 21:11:08| 27   4  69   0   0|0.73 0.91 1.14|1.0   0 1.4|2240    12k|
  0    46k|   0  4.40
31-01 21:11:18| 35   4  61   0   0|0.78 0.91 1.13|3.0   0 1.3|2749    13k|
  0    62k|   0  4.50
31-01 21:11:28| 34   4  62   0   0|0.82 0.92 1.13|  0   0 1.2|2496    13k|
  0    42k|   0  5.90
31-01 21:11:38| 34   6  60   0   0|1.01 0.95 1.14|3.0   0 1.2|2762    13k|
  0   296k|   0  12.2

Yes, CPU usage goes up (idle time goes down from 81% to 61%).
But the fan never kicks in and the laptop remains responsive.
Some Javascript on some other pages do cause the fan to kick in though.

I do have NoScript, and UBlock Origin. But google.com and gstatic.com are
allowed.
-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
Fast Reliable Drupal
Drupal performance optimization, hosting and consulting.
"Sooner or later, this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going
to blow up in our faces." -- Dr. Carl Sagan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://kwlug.org/pipermail/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org/attachments/20220131/f1a5fdbb/attachment.htm>