1424849 - Firefox is slow under high GPU load even with hardware acceleration disabled

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Graphics, defect, P3)

Description

[lucas]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/63.0.3239.84 Chrome/63.0.3239.84 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Use Firefox, with hardware acceleration disabled, while simultaneously running a GPU intensive program (like a CUDA-enabled simulation).
The system has 16 cpu cores and 64 GB of RAM, so plenty of cpu resources are available.


Actual results:

Firefox interface is very slow to redraw (upwards of a second for even a simple page) when scrolling, switching tabs, etc. Keyboard input is also noticeably delayed.
This is 100% reproducible by starting and stopping the load generating software.
When no other GPU-heavy software is running, Firefox is fast and responsive.


Expected results:

Firefox should continue running as normal, like eg. Chrome, or in fact any other software I run, does under the same system conditions.

Comment 1

[Dmitry]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0

Yes, Firefox becomes very slow when I'm running GPU-intensive tasks like Folding@home and almost unusable if it's playing any HTML5 video, while Chromium works fine under such conditions, and even playing 1080p video in it doesn't cause any significant loss of responsiveness.

Comment 2

[lucas]

The problem persists as of version 69.0.3. Disabling hardware acceleration and smooth scrolling improves things a bit, but still not to an extend where productivity is possible.

Comment 3

[pando855]

Problem persists with Firefox 76.0a1.
Performance link
about:support link

Comment 4

[karlthane]

Problem persists under Firefox 77.0.1 on Fedora 32, Xorg w/ Nvidia driver. Running BOINC in background, Firefox is very unresponsive, slow jagged scrolling, unable to change tabs, very slow keyboard input. Contrast with Chrome(ium) where even under high load, browser is still responsive.

Comment 5

[Permyakov.Evgeny]

I'm running BOINC to with FF 77 on Ubuntu 18.04

Solved by enabling WebRender
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/20/firefox-webrender-rollout-begins-with-the-release-of-firefox-67/

Comment 6

[Ming]

I can confirm that Permyakov's answer solves the problem.
It works for me on Ubuntu 20.04, Firefox 86.0.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

bhood, I believe the reporter is gone - unresponsive in another bug report