Lucid firefox renders Launchpad very slowly

Bug #537298 reported by Didier Roche-Tolomelli
40
This bug affects 7 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Invalid
Undecided
Māris Fogels
firefox (Ubuntu)
New
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

This issue has been tracked yesterday with mars.
As a video is better than words, you can have a look at: http://people.canonical.com/~didrocks/slowLP-1.ogv

So here, you can see that:
- only firefox is affected, not chromium
- only LP pages make the rendering slow (3-4s)
- even opening the firefox option dialog over a LP page in Firefox is slow to refresh.

I can add that:
- there is a CPU pick when drawing a LP page.
- I don't have accelerated driver currently enabled, that's what in my mind, show the issue.
- moving another window above a LP rendered page has the same effect of slowness to refresh (chugging)
- I have a 32 bit system
- I'm not the only one to have that. I just think it's obvious on my machine due to the lack of accelerated driver
- I tried with a new firefox profile, same issue
- using safe-mode and removing all plugins has the same effect.

I get the same delay on https://code.launchpad.net/ page (not as bad as in the screencast, but still)

So we tried various things with mars (desactivating JS didn't get everything). A local copied file shows the same behavior.
Deactivating images fix the issue. Unfortunately, we tried a webpage with only images (http://people.canonical.com/~mars/lp-images-test.html) and the issue isn't reproduceable.
If I deactivate CSS, no issue as well.

-> So, it's images + Layout which make this strange bug in FF lucid.
We got until the fact that:
- this page has the bug: http://people.canonical.com/~mars/lp-images-test/0/357235.html
- this one, with some stripped part hasn't it: http://people.canonical.com/~mars/lp-images-test/1/357235.html

Revision history for this message
Guilherme Salgado (salgado) wrote :

leaving it as new and assigning to Maris until we know what's causing it

affects: launchpad → launchpad-foundations
Changed in launchpad-foundations:
assignee: nobody → Māris Fogels (mars)
summary: - Launchpad make firefox rendering pages very slow with lucid version
+ Lucid firefox renders Launchpad very slowly
Revision history for this message
Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste) wrote :

Can't reproduce with Firefox 3.6 on Windows (running in a virtualbox)

Revision history for this message
Micah Gersten (micahg) wrote :

@Didier Roche

Would you be able to test with Firefox's upstream build and a new profile? Just decompress the tarball and run it as /path/to/firefox -ProfileManager

Also, what video card do you have?

Revision history for this message
Māris Fogels (mars) wrote :

This appears to be an issue in Firefox. Launchpad is only the trigger for the issue, so I am marking it as Invalid for Launchpad Foundations.

Changed in launchpad-foundations:
status: New → Invalid
Revision history for this message
Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks) wrote :

@Francis J. Lacoste:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G71 [GeForce Go 7900 GS] (rev a1)
As stated in the bug report, I use a non accelerated graphic driver (nouveau and nv), which should make the issue obvious

I tried with upstream tarball and a new profile (without any plugin), and the issue is still there.

@Māris Fogels:
as it doesn't appear with other more more complex pages, I'm just afraid that people will blame Launchpad for not finding a workaround, but yeah… I agree that the issue seems to be in firefox rendering engine.
By the way, I find the issue being more obvious when displaying the right menu of susbscribed people. On a long thread of discussion on a bug report (when you don't have this right menu exposed), it seems to be way way faster.

Revision history for this message
Mike (mike-fdb) wrote :

I'm using official FF nightly builds and nvidia's binary driver on 9600GT, jit enabled (chrome and content).
LP is very sluggish to render and scroll for about one month.

There are many FF scroll-speed related bugs, but most infamous is lags due to CSS :fixed positioning.
Does LP use :fixed css?

Revision history for this message
Mike (mike-fdb) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Māris Fogels (mars) wrote :

@Mike, good find.

No, we do not use the "position :fixed" css attribute, but from my reading of bug 223238, it could be triggered by something as trivial as using a repeating background image :/

Bug 223238 makes this sound pretty wide-spread. Launchpad will not be the only site on which people notice a problem.

@Didier, are you able to verify the issue on some of the websites listed in bug 223238?

Revision history for this message
Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks) wrote :

Yeah, same issues on the (still) available pages. I don't go too much on website having repeated images (forums ubuntu, wiki and other doesn't). It's less noticeable on the page provided on this bug as I guess the images aren't repeated so much (half a second before refreshing graphics is less than 4-5 seconds in Launchpad :))

Not sure you want to change a bit of your css to do a workaround. If it's not the case, feel free to mark it as a dupe of bug 223238.

Revision history for this message
Mike (mike-fdb) wrote :

@Māris
Well, I've just completed new "tests" on computer with Intel video.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.3a3pre) Gecko/20100304 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Minefield/3.7a3pre — ubuntu mozilla-ppa build, scrolling is *lagging* on page with long bug list
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.3a3pre) Gecko/20100314 Minefield/3.7a3pre — official mozilla build, do *not* lag!
Both on clean profile with adblockplus extension.

So, two conclusions.
1. it is not (directly) related to nvidia binary driver
2. it depend on build config, OR fixed in-between from 0304 to 0314 in mozilla-central

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