[kwlug-disc] Firefox resource usage

Mon Jan 31 22:17:32 EST 2022

I'm on a holy trifecta of 2011-era X220/T520/T420  Thinkpads most of the
time running FF-ESR and FF regular,

I have Auto_Tab_Discard installed on FF which quiets down my CPU to some
8-12%.  Puts tabs to sleep.
I have anywhere from 120-270 tabs in 4 sessions of FF(lowers head in
shame).
Without this add-on, FF historically would be consuming around 25-28% of
CPU time(htop), fan blowing, uncomfortable on lap.

Khalid, that T450 is from 2015-ish and remarkably more power-efficient than
the T420 stuff from 3-4 years prior.

I have some difficulty with java-happy sites on FF-ESR but no issues with
FF regular, both were CPU hogs, until my daughter schooled me in the glory
of of Auto_tab_Discard.

See:
https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html

Ron S.

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 9:19 PM Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> 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
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