1436349 - Firefox eat brandwith in ltsp environment

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Widget: Gtk, defect, P5)

Description

[justin72]

Attachment: firefox-brandwidth.mp4

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20180123215146

Steps to reproduce:

Hi, I'm working on
- debian jessie or stretch, updated, with ltsp
- terminal connect to server work fine
- open firefox (many versions, end user & ESR)
- surf on google site



Actual results:

lot of network traffic on local gb network between ltsp terminal and the server
-> slow down / freeze all terminals
external (internet) traffic look normal

I'm not a guru, so maybe a video can be more explicit



Expected results:

in ltsp config on a gigabit network, display response for many other applications (libreoffice, gimp, ...) is very fast; stations can even display hd movie with respectable fps : I feel ff can be fast as is it on local machines.  Ready to make some specifics tests if you request it to help find a solution.

Comment 1

[Michal Novotny [:michal]]

It's not a necko bug because it's X11 traffic. I don't have ltsp, but I can reproduce it when I run firefox on a remote machine using X11 tunneled via ssh. When www.google.cz page is opened in full screen window firefox generates ~340 Mbit. Btw, chrome behaves similarly and produces ~190 MBit. I guess it's refresh rate is lower.

Comment 2

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

There must be something we're redrawing on those pages, and I guess we present the whole window every time we update, Nical, is there a way we can tell X11 which part of the window we changed?

Tentatively changing this to widget, since OGL is not enabled by default on Linux, I'm guessing the GTK widget is where this would have to be done, somehow.

(fwiw the uploaded video does not play for me)

Comment 3

[justin72]

After 2 weeks, any chance to get help about this issue ?
I hope I'm not the one using lstp with firefox...
Still ready to help.
(right click, save target as to see the video, work fine with vlc)

Comment 4

[Michal Novotny [:michal]]

I don't think this can be easily solved in Firefox, although it would be good to know why there is a difference between Firefox and Chrome.

You could lower frame rate in Firefox by setting preference layout.frame_rate in about:config (restart of Firefox is then needed). But even 3 fps still needs a lot of traffic while it makes browsing uncomfortable.

You should IMO replace X11 with X2Go. It needs much less bandwidth and the connection speed and used compression is configurable. I'm not familiar with LTSP but according to a quick google search it should be possible to use X2Go with LTSP.

Comment 5

[Nicolas Silva [:nical]]

We can likely tweak the widget code so that we communicate to the window manager the invalidated regions of the window and let it do its own bandwidth saving optimizations. We already do something like this on windows, so the infrastructure for knowing the invalid region is already in place, we only need to figure out if and how to pass it to X11.

> After 2 weeks, any chance to get help about this issue ?

Sorry but currently nobody on our side is poking at the X11 widget layer, and I don't even know for sure that anyone is knowledgeable in this area. At the same time everyone is busy with lots of stuff so it'll probably take a while for this bug to get a fix, unless someone familiar with X11 steps up and do the work.

Comment 6

[justin72]

I understand and thank you for you replies.
Also thanks for the x2go suggestion, in case this can help others I found this page :
https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/wiki:advanced:tce:install?s[]=ltsp
It's look a good alternative solution and I'll try soon !

Comment 7

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1552613