Bug#584495: iceweasel: Iceweasel terribly sluggish

Stefan Monnier monnier at iro.umontreal.ca
Thu Jun 3 23:49:59 UTC 2010


Package: iceweasel
Version: 3.5.9-3
Severity: normal

For a couple months now maybe, I've noticed that Iceweasel is very sluggish.
The slowness seems to be local (i.e. unrelated to the speed of connection) and
manifests itself for example when moving the mouse horizontally across the
menubar, where the redraw of the menus has trouble keeping up with the mouse
movement, or when switching from one tab to another, where there's a clear
delay and I get to see the tab being redrawn about 0.5s-1s before the actual
windo's content.

This is on a 2.4GHz Althon X2 with 4GB of RAM, so it's not due to swapping, nor
to the machine being particularly slow.
The X server is using `nv', so it's not super fast, but it's been quite
sufficient until now and doesn't seem to justify this sluggishness.

It's even worse if I try to display from the same machine on some other
machine's Xserver (a Thinkpad X201s laptop on the same 54Mb/s wifi network):
such remote connection is completely unusable for iceweasel, whereas I've used
such remote display in the past (maybe a year ago) where the slowdown was very
acceptable.

I have tried "iceweasel -no-remote -P" and run with a brand new profile, and
have also tried with "iceweasel -safe-mode", but they still suffer from the
sluggish display.

The odd thing about it is that I use very similar Debian installs on many
machines and don't notice this slowdown on all machines.  Also I've noticed it
at times on one machine, and then a week later it seemed to have disappeared.
So I feel like maybe it has something to do with the underlying libraries (poor
performance when some libraries and iceweasel are not upgraded at the same
time, maybe?).

I have not reported it until now specifically because it seemed somewhat
transient, and because I cannot really point to something very specific about
the sluggishness.  But since the problem seems to still be around, and since I
recently noticed that the remote display is *really* slow, I felt it was time
(and important) to report it.



-- Package-specific info:

-- Extensions information
Name: Ad Hacker
Location: ${PROFILE_EXTENSIONS}/firefox at adhacker.com
Status: enabled

Name: Adblock Plus
Location: ${PROFILE_EXTENSIONS}/{d10d0bf8-f5b5-c8b4-a8b2-2b9879e08c5d}
Status: enabled

Name: Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper
Location: ${PROFILE_EXTENSIONS}/elemhidehelper at adblockplus.org
Status: user-disabled

Name: BetterPrivacy
Location: ${PROFILE_EXTENSIONS}/{d40f5e7b-d2cf-4856-b441-cc613eeffbe3}
Status: enabled

Name: Default
Location: /usr/lib/iceweasel/extensions/{972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd}
Package: iceweasel
Status: enabled

Name: Disable Targets For Downloads
Location: ${PROFILE_EXTENSIONS}/{FF380879-E2AA-4E2D-A348-99B9CBD7D3C0}
Status: app-disabled

Name: Download Manager Tweak
Location: ${PROFILE_EXTENSIONS}/{F8A55C97-3DB6-4961-A81D-0DE0080E53CB}
Status: enabled

Name: Firemacs
Location: ${PROFILE_EXTENSIONS}/{e98b7313-167d-48c6-89be-bc514d6de8d9}
Status: enabled

-- Plugins information
Name: DivX® Web Player
Location: /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-mully-plugin.so
Package: totem-mozilla
Status: enabled

Name: QuickTime Plug-in 7.6.6
Location: /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-narrowspace-plugin.so
Package: totem-mozilla
Status: enabled

Name: Shockwave Flash
Location: /usr/lib/gnash/libgnashplugin.so
Package: mozilla-plugin-gnash
Status: enabled

Name: VLC Multimedia Plugin (compatible Totem 2.30.2)
Location: /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-cone-plugin.so
Package: totem-mozilla
Status: enabled

Name: Windows Media Player Plug-in 10 (compatible; Totem)
Location: /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-gmp-plugin.so
Package: totem-mozilla
Status: enabled


-- Addons package information
ii  iceweasel      3.5.9-3        Web browser based on Firefox
ii  mozilla-plugin 0.8.7-2+b1     free Shockwave Flash (SWF) movie player - Pl
ii  totem-mozilla  2.30.2-1       Totem Mozilla plugin

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-3-686-bigmem (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_CH.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_CH.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages iceweasel depends on:
ii  debianutils                   3.2.3      Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  fontconfig                    2.8.0-2.1  generic font configuration library
ii  libc6                         2.10.2-9   Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libgcc1                       1:4.4.4-1  GCC support library
ii  libglib2.0-0                  2.24.1-1   The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgtk2.0-0                   2.20.1-1   The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libnspr4-0d                   4.8.4-1    NetScape Portable Runtime Library
ii  libstdc++6                    4.4.4-1    The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  procps                        1:3.2.8-9  /proc file system utilities
ii  xulrunner-1.9.1               1.9.1.9-7  XUL + XPCOM application runner

iceweasel recommends no packages.

Versions of packages iceweasel suggests:
ii  libgssapi-krb5-2            1.8.1+dfsg-3 MIT Kerberos runtime libraries - k
pn  mozplugger                  <none>       (no description available)
ii  ttf-lyx                     1.6.5-1      TrueType versions of some TeX font
pn  ttf-mathematica4.1          <none>       (no description available)
pn  xfonts-mathml               <none>       (no description available)
pn  xprint                      <none>       (no description available)

Versions of packages xulrunner-1.9.1 depends on:
ii  libasound2              1.0.22-2         shared library for ALSA applicatio
ii  libatk1.0-0             1.30.0-1         The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libbz2-1.0              1.0.5-4          high-quality block-sorting file co
ii  libc6                   2.10.2-9         Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libcairo2               1.8.10-4         The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra
ii  libdbus-1-3             1.2.24-1         simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libfontconfig1          2.8.0-2.1        generic font configuration library
ii  libfreetype6            2.3.11-1         FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii  libgcc1                 1:4.4.4-1        GCC support library
ii  libglib2.0-0            2.24.1-1         The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgtk2.0-0             2.20.1-1         The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libhunspell-1.2-0       1.2.11-1         spell checker and morphological an
ii  libjpeg62               6b-16.1          The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG 
ii  libmozjs2d              1.9.1.9-7        The Mozilla SpiderMonkey JavaScrip
ii  libnspr4-0d             4.8.4-1          NetScape Portable Runtime Library
ii  libnss3-1d              3.12.6-2         Network Security Service libraries
ii  libpango1.0-0           1.28.0-1         Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libpng12-0              1.2.43-1         PNG library - runtime
ii  libreadline6            6.1-1            GNU readline and history libraries
ii  libsqlite3-0            3.6.23.1-2       SQLite 3 shared library
ii  libstartup-notification 0.10-1           library for program launch feedbac
ii  libstdc++6              4.4.4-1          The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  libx11-6                2:1.3.3-3        X11 client-side library
ii  libxrender1             1:0.9.5-2        X Rendering Extension client libra
ii  libxt6                  1:1.0.7-1        X11 toolkit intrinsics library
ii  zlib1g                  1:1.2.3.4.dfsg-3 compression library - runtime

-- no debconf information





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