FC4 - a couple of slowness issues.

[Tim]

On Wed, 2006-08-16 at 21:10 -0400, William W. Austin wrote:
> Problem 1: firefox CRAWLS.  Mozilla, galeon, epiphany and konqueror ALL
> load web pages, images, etc. far faster.  Time comparison for loading a
> local web page (fairly straightforward - text and jpeg images mixed -
> but rather large) takes under a second with any of the other browsers,
> and takes over 20 seconds with firefox.  If I boot back to FC4 and run  
> 1.0.8.1-1.fc4 it runs essentially the same speed as the other browsers.
> I collect astronomy images (primarily very large tiff images), and the  
> download time delays are short with the other browsers (FC5) but often  
> more than 15 seconds BEFORE the download starts with firefox.  If I  
> boot back to FC4, the problem goes away.
>
> The ONLY major difference is that I went ahead and enabled selinux on  
> the machine when installing FC5, whereas in FC4 I did not (I also have  
> a dedicated firwall box which theoretically eliminates the need for  
> selunx, but I wanted to try it).

I see something similar on FC4, though I do have SELinux enabled.  It's
set for enforcing on this machine, differently on others, but I haven't
paid attention to how well Firefox is running on them.  I notice various
configurable things that make Firefox sluggish:

      * The number of entries left in the downloads window
      * Long history
      * Large cache
      * RSS bookmarks

Firefox is generally okay, but open a few tabs and it crawls.  The above
make it slower to start and use.

-- 
(Currently running FC4, occasionally trying FC5.)

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