107371 - New browser windows take up to 6 seconds to open on an Athlon 1.2Ghz!

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Erico Mendonca]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011016
BuildID:    2001101616

Machine is an Athlon 1.2Ghz with 256MB of RAM, ASUS A7V-E motherboard, running
OS/2 MCP with fixpak #1 and kernel 14.080c.

Whenever a new browser window is open, either as a pop-up or with CTRL+N, the
CPU goes to 100% for 6 seconds before showing the window.

Setting CLOCKSCALE=4 in CONFIG.SYS lowered the wait to 3-4 seconds.

As a consequence, any page with the usual dozen of popups will take ages to load.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Mozilla
2. Press CTRL+N or go to an URL that opens pop-ups.

Actual Results:  The CPU goes to 100% for 6 seconds before showing the window.

Expected Results:  Well, show the window a little bit faster, being at 1.2Ghz :)

So far I have only seen this bug in my machine. A friend with a PIII 850 Mhz
opens new windows instantly. "Open New Tab" works perfectly (no wait).

Comment 1

[Sean Harding]

Opening a new window is very slow for me in FreeBSD (PIII 500 and PII 366) as
well. Has been for at least a few weeks. It's definitely much slower than it
used to be.

I'm currently using the 2001102908 linux build, but like I said, I've been
seeing this for weeks.

Comment 2

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Have you tried it without the new kernel on at all?

Comment 3

[Erico Mendonca]

I found out I was using a wrong version of the kernel, the W4 version when I was
supposed to be using the UNI version (I'm running MCP). 

Anyway, I tested it with kernel 14.072 and 14.080_UNI. Both showed the same problem.


-- Erico

Comment 4

[Erico Mendonca]

Is there any code that calculates delays in Mozilla or does it rely on
system-generated delays?

I don't have an Intel CPU of comparable speed to test, but it works on a PIII
850Mhz. Could it be related to the clock speed (or how AMD reports it)?

-- Erico

Comment 5

[Sean Harding]

I don't think it has anything to do with AMD. Like I said, I've been seeing this
for a while too (and posted about it in the performance newsgroup) and all of
the machines I've seen it on have Intel CPUs.

Comment 6

[timeless]

It took about 3s on my p3 (unknown) w/ 128mb of ram running ns6.2 w32 (win98se).

wrt popups, 2 suggestions:
* disable dom open on load (add it to prefs.js or something)
* use tab browser and set it to load new windows in tabs (it's in the
preferences dialog in tab browser) - note this requires a semi recent mozilla
build (0.9.4/ns6.2 don't have it).

what sort of profiling tools can you access? cprof, jprof, and quantify are
among the ones we mention on occasion.

Comment 7

[Stephen D Cope]

Running an Athlon 800 (Linux 2.4.13-ac6), and 0.9.6 takes a long time for new
windows to open - perhaps in the range of 6 seconds.

0.9.5 was quite snappy.

Using the Debian unstable .debs

Comment 8

[Stephen D Cope]

Addendum ... I discovered the ``dpkg -i'' operation to install Debian had not
been completed (missing dependancy of mozilla-mailnews).

When that was fixed by installing mozilla-mailnews, at which dpkg did the
configuration for mozilla.

It's still a little sluggish to open new windows (~0.7 seconds) but is now at
the speed of 0.9.5.

Comment 9

[Erico Mendonca]

I believe I may have found a possible cause: the size of the "bookmarks.html" file.

I tried Monday's nightly build of 0.9.6, and it worked flawlessly with my
bookmarks.html file (~500kb), the windows opened instantaneously as they should. 

Today I downloaded the 0.9.6 release build, installed it on a new directory.
With the default bookmarks.html file created, windows open instantaneously.
Placing my 500kb bookmark file will make it crawl 6-7 seconds each time a new
window is opened. I tested with an older bookmark file (~97kb), and with it new
windows take 2 secs to open.

Is there anything wildly different between the nightly build and the release
build other than debug info/tools?

-- Erico

Comment 10

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Interesting. There aren't any significant differenced between the nightly and
the milestone (except the code changes that took place between the two builds).
I'm really not sure how the same bookmarks file (which hasn't changed between
the two tests on nightly and milestone build?) could have that impact. Over to
Component: Bookmarks for further investigation.

Comment 11

[Erico Mendonca]

I'm using the following builds to test:
27/11/01  16:47   14243342           0  mozilla-os2-vacpp-0.9.6.zip
28/11/01  15:22   14677713           0  mozilla-os2.zip

and these bookmark files:
29/11/01   0:24     498432           0  bookmarks.html
28/11/01  20:53      95614           0  bookmarks.medium
28/11/01  19:27       5225           0  bookmarks.old

with the nightly build, windows open instantaneously with any of these. 
With the release build, the open time appears to be proportional to the 
size of the bookmark files. 

I just reinstalled both builds and created fresh profiles to test this. 
One run with each bookmark file for each build. The situation appears 
to be consistent.

Does the bookmark file get loaded in memory every time a new instance 
is started or does it use a "shared" copy?

-- Erico

Comment 12

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Are you still seeing this problem with 0.9.7?

Comment 13

[Erico Mendonca]

No I'm not. I just keep forgetting to post a comment here, you may close it.

0.9.7 is working fine.


-- Erico

Comment 14

[Chris Lyon]

Resolving based on reporter's comments.