1453543 - Firefox touchpad scrolling is laggy/slow only on battery power on a Sager NP8152 (Clevo P650RP6-G) on Windows 10 with nVidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Panning and Zooming, defect)

Description

[Patrick Szalapski]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0
Build ID: 20180323154952

Steps to reproduce:

In Firefox version 59.0.2 on a Core i7 6xxx series with the latest nVidia graphics card drivers, when on battery power only, my two-finger touchpad scrolling experience in Firefox is terrible. When I scroll with two fingers and hold (i.e. not flick), scrolling by half a screen up or down, the scroll starts right away, but takes several seconds to get there. Here's an example. In the animated Gif linked here, I gestured fast and cleanly, in a split second, but it took several seconds to be done scrolling. The two finger gesture was in one motion, but the scrolling window seemed to scroll slow and medium speed and then slow again.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/CircularMeaslyBuzzard-size_restricted.gif

The problem isn't so much lag per se--it starts scrolling immediately; nor is it starving for CPU or resources. It seems instead that there is something programmatic keeping it from scrolling faster or "with more FPS".

Other Windows apps seem to scroll with the gesture just fine.   This is on a Sager NP8152 (Clevo P650RP6-G) on Windows 10 with nVidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics.

When I disable hardware acceleration, the problem goes away.


Actual results:

The scroll starts right away, but takes several seconds to get there. Here's an example.


Expected results:

The scroll should be faster, smooth, and end very quickly.

Comment 1

[Patrick Szalapski]

Adjusting Windows 10 minimum CPU when on battery power didn't help.  Disabling all add-ons didn't help.  Changing  mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount doesn't help.

Comment 2

[Patrick Szalapski]

See also https://superuser.com/questions/1309605/firefox-touchpad-scrolling-is-laggy-slow-only-on-battery-power

Comment 3

[David Olah]

Hi Patrick Szalapski,

I cannot reproduce this issue neither on Firefox 59 neither on the last Nightly.

Can you please try to reproduce this issue on Safe Mode? Here are the steps to help you: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode

If it is still reproducing, you can find here the steps to create a new profile: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles

Install Nightly if the bug is still reproducible from this link: https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-nightly-stub&os=win&lang=ro&attribution_code=c291cmNlPXd3dy5nb29nbGUucm8mbWVkaXVtPXJlZmVycmFsJmNhbXBhaWduPShub3Qgc2V0KSZjb250ZW50PShub3Qgc2V0KSZ0aW1lc3RhbXA9MTUyMzk3MDU2NA..&attribution_sig=b0907efb91726976d5f3240fd8b4efc7907279877a7fcee92e863190f8ebaf5c

Comment 4

[Patrick Szalapski]

As noted in the SuperUser post, switching hardware acceleration off solves the problem.  So obviously safe mode also solves the problem.

Any thoughts?

Comment 5

[David Olah]

Thanks Patrick for your reply.
When you say Safe mode, do you refer to Windows or Firefox?

Kats, can you please take a look at this issue?

Comment 6

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Hi Patrick, can you use the steps at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance/Reporting_a_Performance_Problem to get a profile and link to it here? Hopefully that will provide some insight. It's interesting that this only happens to you with accelerated graphics on battery power, that sounds like the graphics card is somehow throttled down on battery. It could be that we get a reduced vsync rate instead of the normal 60fps or something. I guess another thing to check is to go to about:config  and turn on the layers.acceleration.draw-fps pref. This will display an FPS counter in the top-left. Try to get a sense of what the FPS is when scrolling both on battery power and plugged in (both with accelerated graphics).