616670 - UI to recycle plugin container

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Emily Bowman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b7) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b7) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b7

The plugin-container.exe is an enormous resource (cpu and memory) hog when even simple flash applets appear, and it seems to have a tendency to slow down the entire browser permanently after being started. I don't know if that's because it repaints the window twice during scrolling or not, but anyway, I'd like to have a way to kill plugin-container and automatically restart it upon switching to a tab with a plugin. I have an older processor and a GPU with only 256M RAM, which occasionally causes Win7 slowdowns, so it might not be as bad for newer ones.

Alternately, a timed reload, once an hour or so. I suppose it would have to request permission to keep from killing things like Pandora or Citrix.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load several sites that have flash animations in tabs.
2. Close some of the tabs, load youtube, etc.
3. Go back to an all-text site, and notice how slow scrolling and tab switching are, even with no Flash on the page.
4. Check a tab with flash, compare to an instance of 3.5, and notice how much slower scrolling a page is in 4.0b7 than 3.5 when it scrolls across the Flash area.
4. Close all tabs with flash, and notice how much faster scrolling and tab switching becomes.
Actual Results:  
Slow scrolling, very slow tab switching.

Expected Results:  
Full speed scrolling on any page without Flash, and at least pre-3.6 scrolling speed on pages with Flash.

Is there a way to turn GPU acceleration off so that I can test the effect of the GPU on page speed?

Comment 1

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

To turn off Direct2D, once it is on by default, set mozilla.widget.render-mode to 0.

Please post the graphics information from about:support

Comment 2

[Emily Bowman]

It turns out I only have 128M GPU RAM.

Graphics
Adapter Description
ATI MOBILITY RADEON X1400
Vendor ID
1002
Device ID
7145
Adapter RAM
Unknown
Adapter Drivers
atiumdag atiumdva atiumd64 atiumd6a atitmm64
Driver Version
8.593.100.0
Driver Date
9-29-2009
Direct2D Enabled
false
DirectWrite Enabled
true
GPU Accelerated Windows
1/1 Direct3D 9

I updated to Minefield nightly and sent in test results for GrafxBot earlier, in case it helps, with no windows open and again with many windows open (where it ran more than twice as slow). The browser seems to speed back up after opening so many tabs that the browser stops treating tabs as separate windows for Aero thumbnails, which is THE major cause of ram exhaustion on my system. (1920x1200 resolution.) Once it goes back to 3.6 behavior with a single thumbnail per window, browsing gets faster again, unless a lot of Flash is also open.

mozilla.widget.render-mode was 6, so I'll test it at 0 for a while.

Comment 3

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Try updating your video drivers...

Comment 4

[Emily Bowman]

I'd love to, but my video card is almost 5 years old, and there hasn't been a driver update for it since 9.3, from mid-2009. The 9.11 and 10.2 releases both only update the Cat Control Center, not the graphics drivers.

Comment 5

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

>>mozilla.widget.render-mode was 6, so I'll test it at 0 for a while.

Any update?

Comment 6

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Closing bug as Incomplete - if you are still experiencing this issue or have more information to provide feel free to post back here and we can re-open the bug. You can also get assistance by visiting the Firefox help site -> http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Ask+a+question