Palemoon very slow to load Instagram Topic is solved

[broadstairs]

I have notice that Palemoon takes an absolute age to load instagram when compared to FF. This is running the x86-64 version on Linux. So far it is the only site I am seeing this in and running FF in parallel instagram loads almost instantly. Is anyone else seeing this? Is it a known issue.

Stuart

[Moonchild]

It's a known issue for Instagram only. I've investigated this and there simply seems to be a network hangup on Instagram's side which causes the hang/delay in Pale Moon as it waits for connection data. No further details are known as to the cause.

[Moonraker]

I have notice that Palemoon takes an absolute age to load instagram when compared to FF. This is running the x86-64 version on Linux. So far it is the only site I am seeing this in and running FF in parallel instagram loads almost instantly. Is anyone else seeing this? Is it a known issue.

Stuart

Thats odd i have just tried the instagram site myself and it appears to load ok,i get to the login page just fine.I did however have to allow 3rd party scripts to execute beforehand.

[broadstairs]

I have noticed that the load time seems variable as later that day when I was having big problems it did get faster. I'll keep an eye on it but certainly when I was having a problem I could start FF and load instagram before Palemoon loaded it completely.

Stuart

[broadstairs]

I've been watching Instagram very carefully while it loads and it seems to hang palemoon in some way briefly so that the activity indicator on the tab stops spinning and it is difficult to do anything else on pm while it loads for example I tried to load it in a new tab while I had this window open and could not immediately switch back to this tab to wait while it loads. So something is happening which actually hangs pm on the active tab, it does switch at some point before Instagram has loaded fully but no where near as quickly as it should. I do not see this behaviour in FF or Chrome. Is there anything I should do to try and determine what is slowing it down?

Stuart

[Moonchild]

I have no idea myself why Instagram specifically is doing this or what exactly the underlying problem is -- it seems to be specifically related to their network setup but I haven't been able to determine the cause.

[broadstairs]

I have also been trying IceCat as a browser and found it would not load Instagram at all, however after some digging I found I needed to set security.ssl.require_safe_negotiation to false in the about:config dialog as it has some bad authentication when trying to load some .js files from a related site. Having set that option in IceCat it loads OK now. Could this be something which is troubling Palemoon?

Stuart

[Moonchild]

"require_safe_negotiation" is false by default in Pale Moon.

[Octopuss]

I was just about to create a thread, but then I found this. I don't normally use Instagram, but when I do, it's horrible pain in the ass. Not only it takes like 1-2 seconds to open an image, just trying to scroll the page almost hangs the browser. I thought the entire site was coded in some horrific way, but then I tried it in IE just because... Well, it's lightning fast, even if I scroll 50 pages down.

edit: To clarify, I am talking about a situation where you are viewing a gallery on the site.

[Octopuss]

Instagram works almost flawlessly under PM 26.1. Opening images still takes some time, but scrolling seems to be perfectly smooth now.

[Milli]

PM 26.1 is indeed slightly faster as before but it's still very very slow. I'm running a high clocked Intel 6-core CPU.
I used to have the exact same issue in FF, the old ones like FF 25, but at one point (I don't know at which version exactly) Instagram got a huge boost in performance.

At the moment in PM any gallery with more than 100 pictures is almost a pain to watch. Never mind bigger ones.
I think it's totally unrelated to networking performance because I can run FF at the exact same time and it will be quite smooth.

I've investigated my CPU load and it seems that PM is CPU limited.
When I scroll fast through a gallery, PM will never load my CPU more than 9% (12 threaded CPU) pointing to the fact that it's limited to a single thread for the page. Actually I've noticed that PM is limited to a single thread for the whole browser just like FF used to be.
If I do the same in FF 44, my CPU load can spike up to 25% meaning that it's using multiple threads to get the job done.
Chrome 49 and IE11 seems to be evenly matched. Both deliver smooth performance and don't cross 12% CPU usage but are still threaded.

Seems like PM will need a huge overhaul before heavy pages like IG will be smooth because not everybody has an OCd Skylake CPU with very high single threaded performance.

[satrow]

Welcome, Milli.

I've only got a Xeon E3-1230v2 but I can assure you that *something* uses 3-4 cores (some individually hitting the max ~3.4-3.8Ghz core speed) here when scrolling way down through https://www.instagram.com/nick_knight/ with PM. Overall, the CPU peaked at somewhere above 15%, rarely dropping below 13%.

[Milli]

Welcome, Milli.

I've only got a Xeon E3-1230v2 but I can assure you that *something* uses 3-4 cores (some individually hitting the max ~3.4-3.8Ghz core speed) here when scrolling way down through https://www.instagram.com/nick_knight/ with PM. Overall, the CPU peaked at somewhere above 15%, rarely dropping below 13%.

What you see there is just thread bouncing. Something Windows does. Moves a thread from one core to the other, constantly.
If you check your process monitor, I'm pretty sure palemoon.exe won't use more than 13% in your case (100/8 threads).

[Cyphox]

Still have this problem with 26.3.3 x64, Instagram just takes ages to load compared to FF, PM even looks like it's frozen for several seconds. Scrolling is painful, the site loading new content is painful, wow. Damn you, Instagram! Why you no optimize your crappy code??

[Milli]

It seems that Palemoon has got some performance improvements in v27. The same websites are taking half the processing time as before and website that were lagging for me (because PM wasn't using more than one thread) are now smooth. Multithreading seems to have been implemented since palemoon.exe is now using more processing time than one processor offers.

[Moonchild]

Considering this as solved by v27. There really isn't anything more that can be done to cater to instagram that hasn't already been done.