Improve startup performance

[zalbard]

Hi Moonchild,

since browsing itself is very fast and smooth as is, perhaps it may be a good idea to look into startup performance of PM. After all, both FF and PM take more time to load than IE and Chrome.

One may think it is an I/O bottleneck, but in reality, a fast SSD at best halves loading speed when compared to a regular HDD. Using about:startup leads me to believe that it's not addons, either.

Looking at task manager during startup, my CPU is loaded only to 13% - which means it [mostly] uses only 1/8 threads, leading to CPU bottleneck.

Could it perhaps be possible to somehow parallelize loading? At least as a long-term project?

Thanks,
zalbard

[Egorro]

Hi Moonchild,

since browsing itself is very fast and smooth as is, perhaps it may be a good idea to look into startup performance of PM. After all, both FF and PM take more time to load than IE and Chrome.

One may think it is an I/O bottleneck, but in reality, a fast SSD at best halves loading speed when compared to a regular HDD. Using about:startup leads me to believe that it's not addons, either.

Looking at task manager during startup, my CPU is loaded only to 13% - which means it [mostly] uses only 1/8 threads, leading to CPU bottleneck.

Could it perhaps be possible to somehow parallelize loading? At least as a long-term project?

Thanks,
zalbard

On my system (4670, SSD etc) it takes about one second to load, if the adblock plus is off. With addon it loads much slower

[Night Wing]

I can't speak for Chrome since I don't use it.

On all four of my computers (2 desktops, 2 laptops), Pale Moon 24.3.2 is faster than Firefox 24.3.0 ESR and Firefox is faster than IE 9 time wise when loading/starting from a cold start when using Windows 7. Same is also true for all four of my computers after all three browsers have been used/hot for awhile when switching amongst the browsers when adding new bookmarks to each browser.

Of course, I don't have any tabs open either at these starts for any of three browsers when I'm using Windows. Same is true for both linux Pale Moon and linux Firefox in Linux Mint 16 and linux SolydX.

As for add-ons (extensions); in Windows Pale Moon I use 3 add-ons, in Windows Firefox I use 4 add-ons and in IE no add-ons.

When using linux Pale Moon 24.3.1, I use 2 add-ons and in linux Firefox 27.0, I use 3 add-ons. All four computers don't have SSD drives either. Just regular HDD drives.

[zalbard]

Of course, I don't have any tabs open either at these starts for any of three browsers when I'm using Windows. Same is true for both linux Pale Moon and linux Firefox in Linux Mint 16 and linux SolydX.

This may be it, most of the time appears to be spent on Session Restore for me.

I do want Session Restore functionality, though.

[Moonchild]

Restoring a lot of tabs simply takes a lot of time, this can't really be helped and is inherent to opening a lot of complex documents (even if they aren't rendered straight away).

[megaman]

Okay, I have used Chromium, never Chrome by itself, but they don't leave any trace of the program running in the background unbeknownst to me. Maybe Chrome runs differently and you can still see a task running but the others do not, I even end everything that is related to the browser in the Task Manager, but lo-and-behold, those browsers still load-up in a blink of an eye, and sometimes they are instantly useable.
Now, if you want an alternative that can help load-up the browser almost instantly, you can try the Preloader topic here in the forums. I have posted a video demonstrating how it works, as well. It is very effective, but it has bugs and glitches.
Other than that, I agree that if we allow more cores to abide with the start-up, the start-up will accelerate. Even so, I don't want to let go of my add-ons and Session Restore.

Edit: With my laptop, with 1.7GHz Dual-core processor, takes almost forever to load-up the browser and I merely have 6 add-ons and 3 plug-ins(1 is disabled), my warm-boot is 9 seconds. The Pre-loader gets me up and running in less than 1 1/2 seconds.

[leegb11]

Hey Megaman
The session restore don't work for me - have played with about config, but cannot get it to work. Also shutdown warning so I don't quit halfway through a download. I Use IDM but a few sites like Avax are not keen so have to switch it off

[megaman]

I went to try Nightly, which can't be compared to the Stable, which PM is built upon, but I noticed something...
The Nightly, with the same Profile as PM, just copied-over, loads up faster than the current PM.
Maybe, I wonder, if someone can tinker to see what is causing this to happen.

[Moonchild]

Probably has something to do with only having 20% of the features left in the core