1482929 - using Yahoo via x11 seems terribly slow compared to Chromium

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Ilguiz Latypov]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:62.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/62.0
Build ID: 20180809104529

Steps to reproduce:

Opened Firefox in an X11 session, entered mail.yahoo.com and clicked around.


Actual results:

Response time to even loading the page appears a minute.  Chromium opens my Yahoo mail dashboard in seconds (or even in one second).

Clicking anything in my Yahoo mail dashboard causes Firefox to respond in a minute.  Chromium responds in a second.



Expected results:

Firefox should respond in a second.

Comment 1

[Ilguiz Latypov]

X11 client: Cygwin.
X11 server: Debian sid.

Comment 2

[Ilguiz Latypov]

Err, I start the X11 session from my up-to-date Cygwin into an up-to-date Debian sid with a startxwin command and the following in ~/.startxwinrc,

  set -x
  exec ssh -Y LINODE_HOST xterm

I then wait for the xterm window to show up and type "firefox" in it.

(So this makes my Cygwin box an X11 server and the Debian sid box an X11 client).

Comment 3

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

Ilguiz Latypov, your environment is a bit complicated to reproduce so, could you please try and confirm the following?
1. Only yahoo has performance problems? (or do all pages seems to lag in x11 session?)
2. Could you disable hardware acceleration and report if the problem persists? (Hamburger menu/Preferences/General/Performance -uncheck the Use recommended performance settings and -uncheck the Use hardware accelaration when available)

Comment 4

[Ilguiz Latypov]

1. I used only Yahoo but now that I see other sites such as cbc.ca/news, twitter.com and quora.com, the difference with Chromium becomes less apparent.
2. I did and the problem persisted. (And a recent apt-get upgrade brought Firefox 61).

On a side note, trying to outpace the slow X11-over-ssh redraws when scrolling the window and clicking the address bar shows that both browsers cannot take input before flushing some of their output.  Perhaps, processing TCP input before flushing TCP output is inherent to X11 libraries and/or protocol.

Animated GIFs such as rolling wheels in place of images to load seem to take their toll on X11/ssh as well.  

Chromium seems to buffer some of its screen redraws before sending the image over X11, and I think this makes it faster.

Comment 5

[Ilguiz Latypov]

I should have said X11/TCP/SSH/TCP to reflect my poor choice of tunneling.  I guess I could set up OpenVPN to have X11/TCP/UDP.

Comment 6

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

Ilguiz Latypov, have you had a chance to try a different tunneling, or maybe just tinker a bit with the ciphers. I don't believe this is a Firefox issue, but more likely the fact that x11/ssh is generally slow.

Could you also please try to set "gfx.xrender.enabled" to "true" in about:config (this is a x2go workaround for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283089 and might improve your experience).

Comment 7

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

Resolving this as incomplete for the time being. Ilguiz, please do reopen this issue with follow-up information (see comment 6).