1089917 - Firefox is very slow with many tabs with heavy graphics

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Sergey Olefir]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:32.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/32.0
Build ID: 20140923175406

Steps to reproduce:

This is all on Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit with 16GB of memory and running 'basic' scheme (i.e. no aero).

- Download latest Firefox Portable (33.0.1 in my test)
- Run it with clean profile / default settings.
- Open maps.google.com and use icons in the bottom right to switch to classic/old maps (this is done in order to easily demonstrate the problem).
- Open streetview (anywhere); adjust screen size (seems 'smoothness' depends on how much is drawn) so that panning street view full 360 degrees is very smooth.
- Open some 25-30 additional tabs with 'news.com' URL in them (it redirects somewhere to cnet) -- the point is that you need to open relatively 'heavy' pages. One way to easily do it is to create a bookmark on the bookmark toolbar and ctrl-click it many times.
- Wait for all the stuff to load (will take a while with a high CPU usage).
- Go back to google maps streetview tab and try panning view 360 degrees again.
- Right click google maps tab and 'Close Other Tabs'.
- Try panning again.


Actual results:

What happens is that with bunch of tabs open panning in google maps is very jerky and is not smooth at all -- this, in fact, affects not only google maps streetview (which is flash-based) but all other Firefox operations -- they are way less responsive after you open a bunch of tabs. Google maps is chosen as an easy way to demonstrate the problem.

Furthermore 'closing all tabs' will 'hang' browser for quite a while with very high (probably single-thread maxed) CPU usage.

Furthermore after all tabs are closed, streetview will still not pan around as smoothly as it does on the initial browser start (i.e. possible resource leak or something).


Expected results:

Firefox operation/responsiveness should not be affected by the number of opened tabs (within reason).

Closing tabs should not 'hang' the browser for so long (ideally it shouldn't do it at all).

Closing tabs should release all/most of the resources, so even if there's some slow down because of many opened tabs, closing them down should 'restore' the initial performance.

For a comparison -- the same test using Opera 12.17 shows that initial page loading may be slower than under FF, however once everything is loaded/settled down there's no visible impact on Google street view performance. Furthermore closing all tabs except street view one doesn't take as much time/browser hang as FF.

Comment 1

[Sergey Olefir]

Forgot to mention -- this problem isn't anything new. It's been around since at least version 24. It does, in fact, seem improved somewhat in 32 (which I currently use) in the sense that it takes longer than 24/28 for the browser to become noticeably non-responsive over time as additional tabs are opened/loaded.

Comment 2

[Kanchan Kumari QA]

Hello Reporter, Thanks for reporting this issue and sorry for getting back to you so late. May I request you to test this issue on the latest released version of firefox and let us know if you still encounter this problem.

Comment 3

[Sergey Olefir]

As far as I can tell, the problem is still present in 43.0.3 (I downloaded a portable version FirefoxPortable_43.0.3_English.paf.exe).

Without access to 'old' maps.google.com it might be less obvious to see, but as far as I can tell, panning around streetview is very smooth when it's the only tab in the newly started browser and it degrades significantly after I open 25 background tabs with news.com

'Close Other Tabs' seems to help, but not fully (although this I can't swear on, might be I'm just seeing what I expect to see).

Comment 4

[Kanchan Kumari QA]

Hello Sergey, thank you for checking it again. Even I tested it just now on FF 43.0.4 on a Windows 7 64 bit machine. Yes, I agree that responsiveness of street view on google map degrades  when there are multiple tabs with heavy graphics opened at the same time. However, once the other tabs are closed, responsiveness improves drastically. I am going to go ahead and change the status of the defect as "New" so that our developers can look into it. Thank You!

Comment 5

[Graham Perrin]

How are things with release 56 and pre-release 57? 

For any affected case it may help to have current details for things such as these: 

* graphics hardware
* driver
* platform version
* desktop environment
* window manager
* whether multiprocess (e10s) is enabled and if so, how many content processes are preferred.

Thanks

Comment 6

[Sergey Olefir]

Tested using https://downloads.sourceforge.net/portableapps/FirefoxPortable_56.0.1_English.paf.exe

The performance appears to be much improved -- closing tabs is pretty much instant (unlike before) and panning in Google Maps seems fine even with ~30 news.com tabs opened.

On the other hand the memory requirements seem incredible -- it was using something like 4-5GBs of memory with ~30 news.com tabs and even after closing all of them (leaving only maps open) it was still using more than 1GB.

Comment 7

[Graham Perrin]

Thanks. 

> … FirefoxPortable_56.0.1_English.paf.exe
> 
> … memory …

(Happy to discuss in #firefox on moznet …)

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Sergey,
Do you still see this when use newer version?

Comment 9

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Redirect a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user to the triage owner.
:bhood, since the bug has recent activity, could you have a look please?

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