Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ... Topic is solved

Users and developers helping users with generic and technical Pale Moon issues on all operating systems.

Moderator: trava90

Forum rules
This board is for technical/general usage questions and troubleshooting for the Pale Moon browser only.
Technical issues and questions not related to the Pale Moon browser should be posted in other boards!
Please keep off-topic and general discussion out of this board, thank you!
Omnimaxus

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Omnimaxus » 2018-05-15, 15:16

Update: I have switched over to Vivaldi. Much faster. I will try Pale Moon again once it gets to version 28. I hope improvements will be made to the rendering engine going forward. Thanks to everyone.

Omnimaxus

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Omnimaxus » 2018-05-15, 18:14

Update (again): I have gone back to using Pale Moon. Vivaldi had a few issues that were dealbreakers. Mostly UI-related things.

User avatar
Moonchild
Pale Moon guru
Pale Moon guru
Posts: 35481
Joined: 2011-08-28, 17:27
Location: Motala, SE
Contact:

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Moonchild » 2018-05-18, 12:09

If AdGuard is a filtering application that filters http traffic, it may have very poor support for a standard HTTP feature that pale moon uses, called http pipelining. This can cause head-of-line hangups if the filter gets confused in which case Pale moon will, after a timeout, switch to separate connections to download elements. This would explain your delay -- if so, this is a serious shortcoming of the AdGuard program that they should address.
You can disable HTTP pipelining in Pale Moon by going to about:config and setting both network.http.pipelining and network.http.pipelining.ssl to false. Restart the browser afterwards and see if that helps. If so it's is confirmed to be lack of pipelining support in AdGuard.
"Sometimes, the best way to get what you want is to be a good person." -- Louis Rossmann
"Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past; wisdom is of the future." -- Native American proverb
"Linux makes everything difficult." -- Lyceus Anubite

Omnimaxus

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Omnimaxus » 2018-05-19, 01:02

Hi, Moonchild. Thanks for responding. I did try using Pale Moon without AdGuard Pro installed. Same result. I tried using Adblock Latitude. Same result. All other browsers work fine and much faster (e.g., Vivaldi, Chrome, Firefox ESR based on version 52, and even IE11). I don't understand what the problem is. Perhaps Pale Moon's rendering engine needs more optimization? I don't know. Maybe it's a GPU driver issue? No idea. But for now, I have resorted to Slimjet Browser. I hope Pale Moon improves in its rendering speed; I would be willing to donate at some point in the future to help fund its development (for sure). Thanks!

User avatar
Moonchild
Pale Moon guru
Pale Moon guru
Posts: 35481
Joined: 2011-08-28, 17:27
Location: Motala, SE
Contact:

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Moonchild » 2018-05-19, 10:20

Your local router may suffer from the same issue of poor pipelining support.
Did you try my suggestion?

It's not a rendering issue, from what i can gather from your report -- it's a networking issue. The behavior is consistent with networking connections not operating smoothly and the browser using a timeout to retry connections with individual connections. Other (mainstream) browsers don't use pipelining because for whatever reason that feature has either not been implemented (despite being part of the http/1.1 spec) or has been shunned by their developers (despite the fact that for https, they made a big deal out of very similar behavior in http/2 but that won't work over normal http -- pipelining does)
Last edited by Moonchild on 2018-05-19, 10:21, edited 2 times in total.
"Sometimes, the best way to get what you want is to be a good person." -- Louis Rossmann
"Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past; wisdom is of the future." -- Native American proverb
"Linux makes everything difficult." -- Lyceus Anubite

Fedor2

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Fedor2 » 2018-05-19, 17:40

Did you try with hardware acceleration disabled?

Cunin

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Cunin » 2018-05-19, 18:19

I just registered to reply to this thread.

I've got pretty much the same software configuration as OP, Win7 x64 with MS' Security Essentials and windows' own firewall, and PM is latest version and x64.
I've been using PM for quite some years now, first as a secondary browser, then as my primary when FF started becoming another copy of Chrome, and then stopped supporting all my add-ons. So thank you for PM :)

I said that to make you understand that I know this browser pretty well, now, using it for hours/day and totaling quite a good number of GB of traffic every month with it alone.
The profile I'm using is the same as the first day I started using it, I just copy it over whenever I reinstall windows (it happens rarely anyway, just once so far since I installed PM), I've got quite some addons installed (7 enabled, 4 disabled), and, believe it or not, I've got 2066 tabs open right now.
My system is an AMD FX 8350 and an AMD RX 560 4GB, I've got 32GB of ram and only mechanical hdds, no SSDs. I just updated it though, I had a Phenom 2 X4 965 (3.4GHz) and a Radeon 6850 1GB, but same mobo and ram, and it wasn't really running differently than now.

You (OP) keep implying how PM's rendering engine may need optimizations, over and over, and completely ignore what people are telling you, which that seem to be a problem on your end. It might be related to PM and its specific settings in your specific system, or maybe even by something else you've got installed or configured in a way that interfere with PM.
My PaleMoon, even though it takes some time to boot up because of the thousands of tabs, once running works flawlessly and the google page you've been having a problem with, doesn't give me the problems you're having (it completely loaded in a few seconds the first time, and about 3 seconds after it was cached, but without image placeholders and the other problems you mentioned).
That doesn't mean PM doesn't have problems, but that the problem might be somewhere else than where you are looking.

Also consider that PM doesn't use all of the available cores/threads of your CPU, unlike chrome and latest FF (and maybe other browsers, since they're all based on the same engines, more or less). Although I don't have a first person experience with your own cpu, I don't think it is so slow as to make PM THAT slow at loading even its own welcome page, and this problem you're having might be exploiting a problem in your own system (99% of times it is a software problem, so resolvable) that you simply didn't notice until now because the other browsers simply use 100% of your cpu, or because they do some things differently.

I am one of the official Serious Sam 3 beta testers, and so I've helped Croteam (the developers) in Steam's forum to give technical support for their game to customers, since I've got to know the game pretty well, and you have no idea of how many people had a problem with it and just came by and said "this is the only game I have a problem with", or stuff like that, and most of the times it was some other software running in their system which interfered with the game, because SS3 does many things differently than other games. It doesn't do things in the wrong way, just differently, and because of that, it often exploited bugs and inefficiencies in both low and high-level software, which didn't happen with most other games and that to the average user looks like the game is doing something wrong.
Of course sometimes it was a bug in the game, but more often than not it was something else, and the same might be happening here, maybe.

rm118899

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by rm118899 » 2018-05-20, 07:21

The speed of the browser as a function of the size of User Profile Data follows an exponential decline model -- I think the main culprit is tabs (even if they are unloaded) or link-following history or both. I conjecture it possibly has something to do with disk I/O or inefficient or overly aggressive memory reclamation or other maintenance threads. I know this from personal experience because I have an old, slow, single-core computer and prefer to use unloaded tabs as tab-strip bookmarks (which seems more convenient than real bookmarks), coupled with auto session restore, and after many months the browser eventually becomes horrifically slow. But when I finally get around to the tedious task of backing everything up (most importantly bookmarks, and unloaded tabs -> save as bookmarks), and migrating to a new profile with just one tab open and no history, it runs 1000x faster. (The person before me said they have 2K tabs open with no issue, but their computer specs are far better [32 GB of RAM, wow!]; a person with a good computer will be less sensitive to all kinds things which will be noticed by people on old, budget computers.) The weird thing is that it will seem like a bandwidth issue because a basic page like Google search will take a long time to load and the spinner icon will be spinning in the tab-strip. (But actually the most annoying thing that happens is that text boxes become horrifically unresponsive, so that sometimes several seconds will pass between when I type a character and when it shows up on the screen. Would it be possible to put user interface elements like text boxes on a separate, high-priority thread?)

User avatar
Al6bus
Lunatic
Lunatic
Posts: 288
Joined: 2015-08-24, 14:55
Location: Lemberg

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Al6bus » 2018-05-20, 17:18

Intel 2600K CPU (4 cores/8 threads), 8 GB of RAM, a SSD
Cunin wrote:Also consider that PM doesn't use all of the available cores/threads of your CPU, unlike chrome and latest FF (and maybe other browsers, since they're all based on the same engines, more or less).
or even not the latest versions of FF (48+), if you know what I mean :mrgreen:
and further, the more will rest on the multithreading, the more often such themes will be created, unfortunately.
Last edited by Al6bus on 2018-05-20, 17:20, edited 1 time in total.
Windows 7 Pro x64 - Pale Moon x64
We hope for multiprocessing

Omnimaxus

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Omnimaxus » 2018-05-20, 21:50

Hi, everyone. I will respond to you individually. But first, a quick note to let you all know that I have gone back to Pale Moon (again). Guess I'm hooked.

I love the old-school style of the browser, and how customizable it is. Kudos to Moonchild for a great browser. In any case, see below ...

******************

1) Moonchild: Yes, I tried your suggestion re: pipelining. No change. (Sorry!)

2) Fedor2: I tried it without hardware acceleration per your suggestion. No change.

3) Cunin: I wasn't aware that Pale Moon doesn't use "all" the cores/threads. Interesting.

(Perhaps Moonchild should change that?)

4) rm118899 and Al6bus: Thanks for commenting.

******************

Guess that's it for now. Thanks to everyone for chipping in so far. I guess I will continue to grin and bear it. Love the UI of Pale Moon, for sure. :D

User avatar
Moonchild
Pale Moon guru
Pale Moon guru
Posts: 35481
Joined: 2011-08-28, 17:27
Location: Motala, SE
Contact:

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Moonchild » 2018-05-21, 01:07

1. Did you restart the browser after changing the setting?
2. Not using all cores (unless something demands it) is a Good Thing™
3. I'm pretty sure it's not a multithreading/core/processing power issue.

Unfortunately none of this will help you get a solution, of course -- except for maybe #1 -- but I don't really have anything more to suggest at the moment.
"Sometimes, the best way to get what you want is to be a good person." -- Louis Rossmann
"Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past; wisdom is of the future." -- Native American proverb
"Linux makes everything difficult." -- Lyceus Anubite

Arc_Light

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Arc_Light » 2018-05-28, 23:27

Hi all,

Registered just for this - I've been using Pale Moon for some time myself, and have noticed a similar issue of late - just in the past week or two it's really been driving me nuts, my normal startup involves several pages opening at once, and for the longest time this was fine, but recently the little green swirly "loading" icons would hang on several of them for a few seconds at a time, and even after they would finish loading, the browser would still be incredibly sluggish for another minute or so. Specs are Pale Moon 27.9.2 on Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit fully patched, i5-8400 / 16 GB / SSD as primary drive, so that really shouldn't be the issue.

First things first I decided to restart in Safe Mode to see if it helped - no dice. Lots of other things I could've tried, to be sure, including several suggestions noted here (thanks to the other posters), but, being lazy and impatient, I was looking for something quicker / easier / less disruptive / more targeted than the usual troubleshooting progression (disable extensions / clear profile / reinstall software / reinstall OS / buy new PC / sacrifice chicken / nuke from orbit / etc.). What I did - and what I would recommend to the OP as well - is to download and run Process Monitor, set it to collect only events associated with Pale Moon, then start Pale Moon, reproduce the problem and see what's going on.

YMMV, but in my case I had already noticed when running Task Manager during these sluggish periods (following the requisite swearing and unnecessarily forceful CTRL-ALT-DEL) that Pale Moon was not using a lot of CPU time, and while the memory footprint could easily be half a GB or more, usage was stable and there was plenty fre - but, the slowdown was always associated with disk activity, even after all pages had loaded and Pale Moon didn't appear to be doing anything. Once the disk activity stopped, Pale Moon was responsive again. The disk activity was not significant in terms of throughput - 3 MB/sec or so, nothing for an SSD - so my assumption was that there were a lot of individual operations taking place (likely unnecessarily). Process Monitor confirmed this - following startup and over the course of almost exactly one minute, during which Pale Moon was very laggy (even though all startup pages loaded in maybe 10 seconds), a lot of operations occurred, but the two that came to dominate the event list over time were to do with [Profile]\OfflineCache\index.sqlite and [Profile]\OfflineCache\index.sqlite-journal, which Pale Moon seemed absolutely hell-bent on thrashing into submission. For the record, index.sqlite in my case was only 544K, and the whole OfflineCache folder tree was only a few MB tops, mainly because I set Pale Moon to clear Offline Website Data on exit, so this should not have been because it was filled with crap that needed to be deleted. You can probably already see where this is going, but, to spell it out, as soon as I saw this I figured PM was doing something silly as far as checking / refilling the offline cache was concerned each time it was starting and (by extension) each time during a new session it came to a site that wanted to drop something in the offline cache - so I allowed PM to preserve Offline Website Data after all, restarted, and lo and behold, problem solved.

Now, to reiterate, this lag is new, whereas my settings were not, so I would suggest that, nonetheless, something has changed with PM, not on my side, that has lead to this behavior - seems to me like a look at any changes affecting the routines associated with the offline cache might deserve a look. Not sure if this explains the OP's problem, but hopefully it helps someone. Certainly happy to have dealt with the issue on my side - much less swearing now required to browse the web. Best wishes,

Arc_Light

User avatar
Moonchild
Pale Moon guru
Pale Moon guru
Posts: 35481
Joined: 2011-08-28, 17:27
Location: Motala, SE
Contact:

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Moonchild » 2018-05-29, 00:48

The code for caching has not been touched at all recently. However, if you clear the cache on exit, then it is not strange, especially if you open a bunch of tabs from a session concurrently, that a lot of small items are going to be stored that would normally be in the cache. How 'busy' this makes the cache depends a lot on which sites are visited.
Reduced performance after clearing the cache is normal.
"Sometimes, the best way to get what you want is to be a good person." -- Louis Rossmann
"Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past; wisdom is of the future." -- Native American proverb
"Linux makes everything difficult." -- Lyceus Anubite

Arc_Light

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Arc_Light » 2018-05-29, 01:23

Fully agree - caching is there to improve performance, so it makes sense that effectively disabling the cache causes a performance hit. Nevertheless, I have observed a definite change in performance in the recent past in spite of no changes in my PM settings, add-ons, etc. To be clear on this point, I've had PM set up to clear the offline cache on exit for years with no such lagging issues, even on slower hardware, until very recently. Altering this setting seems to have addressed the lag in my case. I'm happy to provide additional information or pursue any requests if you have them - but beyond that, I'm not able to offer much else for the moment (sorry) - just happy to have it behaving better, since performance is one of the main reasons I made the switch to PM in the first place. Thanks for writing,

Arc_Light

User avatar
Moonchild
Pale Moon guru
Pale Moon guru
Posts: 35481
Joined: 2011-08-28, 17:27
Location: Motala, SE
Contact:

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Moonchild » 2018-05-29, 09:52

Keep in mind that "clearing on exit" is not the same as "disabling", since in the former case you are tasking the browser with a large amount of work re-filling the cache and rewriting the index upon startup.
It seems to me that your system, despite using an SSD, has an I/O bottleneck. I don't think this is something that is a browser side problem (since nothing has changed on our end) and should be looked at more at the system level. What comes to mind and should be noted is that recent kernel patches for meltdown and spectre specifically can cause such slowdowns, especially with accessing the same file in rapid succession like the cache index.
"Sometimes, the best way to get what you want is to be a good person." -- Louis Rossmann
"Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past; wisdom is of the future." -- Native American proverb
"Linux makes everything difficult." -- Lyceus Anubite

Arc_Light

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Arc_Light » 2018-05-29, 22:46

We agree; indeed, this is why I used the qualifier "effectively" - the intent was to indicate that it was "disabled" only insofar as its capacity to improve PM's performance (the context in which I was speaking at the time). As for there being an I/O bottleneck, I cannot rule this out without further testing, but it's difficult to explain why this would've appeared in the last few weeks with no apparently relevant changes to my PC. I appreciate the suggestion to consider the Meltdown and Spectre patches, as I have indeed read such things about their effects on IO; that said, my understanding is that the last updates of this sort that applied to Windows 8.1 came out around a couple of months ago:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... e-meltdown

...whereas I don't recall this issue cropping up until more recently. Were I running Windows 10 it might be another story, but seeing as how I'm running a Kaby Lake CPU under Windows 8.1, my existence apparently threatens MS profit margins, so they've been trying very hard to deny users like myself updates for some time now, and sending us messages telling us that our CPUs are incompatible with our OS (funny, it was compatible when I built it) and that we need to upgrade to Windows 10. In any event, you reminded me that I needed to flash my BIOS to better secure my PC vs. Spectre - definitely appreciated - so I will go ahead and do that. If you have suggestions on things I could try to test the aforementioned theory, just let me know; happy to share my Process Monitor logfile in the meantime if it helps. Best wishes,

Arc_Light

Arc_Light

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Arc_Light » 2018-05-30, 00:55

As a quick follow-up, I flashed my BIOS with the latest firmware, having observed that I was not fully protected from Meltdown - indeed, I had missed two BIOS revisions since building this PC (too used to having hardware so old it's no longer updated :) Then, based on our discussions here, I decided to re-enable the "clear offline cache" setting on Pale Moon to see if this had any impact in the IO issue - the results were far better than before, much higher disk throughput over a much shorter period of time and little or no lag on startup, much closer to how it had been way back when. So, Moonchild, thanks again for turning me on to this - that was a good suggestion. For others, there is a nice guide here for checking your level of Spectre / Meltdown protection:

https://www.howtogeek.com/338801/how-to ... d-spectre/

This doesn't mean a BIOS update will help everyone, but clearly this is worth a look. Best wishes,

Arc_Light

SenDion

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by SenDion » 2018-07-29, 05:30

Operating system: Windows 7 Professional, Service Pack 1
Physical Memory: Windows Task Manager shows 3240MB total
Pale Moon: desktop 32 bits, ver. 27.9.4
Problem: Browser occasionally becomes unresponsive. It doesn't crash (which indicates better than average stability). Given enough time, it regains the responsiveness.
How to reproduce: I don't know what has to be done to reproduce this on someone's else PC.

Details
I am experiencing:
  1. Dragging the slider with a mouse on some heavy pages is not smooth: the slider lags behind the mouse pointer. The page doesn't move smoothly either; it jumps whenever the slider jumps. For instance, this page.
  2. If a heavy page is loaded in tab "A", and I switch the focus to a different tab "B", the page in the tab "B" starts to behave as in (a) above, even if it is the light one.
  3. The initial start of PM loads https://palemoon.start.me. It takes 15 sec to load this page if "clear cache on exit" is not set, and 30 sec if "clear cache on exit" is set. The initial load time is the least important among my concerns.
Observations
  1. With ISP download speed 12Mbps, the slow responsiveness is getting quite annoying. With ISP download speed 87Mbps, the slow responsiveness is negligible and goes unnoticed. Note that I am talking about the same PC, same operating system, same browser.
  2. I left tab "A" with this page for 2.5 hr. When I came back, the PM memory consumption (i.e. private working set) reached 1,500 MB. At this moment, the PM froze and didn't respond for several minutes. When its responsiveness came back, I closed the tab "A". The consumed memory dropped, but the browser still was getting unresponsive quite often (every second scroll, or button click). I opened "about:memory" and pressed "Minimize memory usage" button: the consumed memory dropped from 870MB to 385 MB. After this, the PM regained its responsiveness.
Questions
  1. With (i) in mind, has anyone (tester or developer) tried to reduce the ISP download speed down to (say) 1Mbps and confirm that the browser doesn't become unresponsive.
  2. With (ii) in mind, has anyone (tester or developer) tried to leave the heavy page in one of the tabs for 3 hr and confirm that the browser doesn't become unresponsive.
  3. In respect to the HTTP pipelining (mentioned by Moonchild), is there a test that user may run on his/her side to get some indication that the HTTP pipelining operates as expected.
  4. Are there other tests (in addition to disabling pipelining, and basic troubleshooting) that user may run on his/her side to get a rough idea what might be wrong?

Thehandyman1957

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Thehandyman1957 » 2018-07-29, 08:37

The link you supplied works fine for me. No lag or jumping. Perhaps this could be a video driver issue?

I'm using W7 64 bit with PM 28 latest 64 bit. Running with 8 gigs of ram on a FX8350.
I watched the ram and processor speed when scrolling on that page and saw no increase of
usage. When loading the page my ram increased only 100mb for a brief time and then went back down.
Screenshot - 7_29_2018 , 1_34_00 AM.png
Screenshot - 7_29_2018 , 1_34_58 AM.png
This is the average amount of ram I normally see being used on my machine.
Occasionally if I'm using a bunch of tabs it will clock up to 1.5 gigs.
I will leave that tab open tonight and check it in the morning and will update.

By the way, what bit version of PM and windows are you using?

UPDATE: Well that didn't take long. I got to thinking about it and I thought, shoot I didn't
turn off Ublock, Disconnect and ABL so I went ahead and white listed them for this page.

And then the party got started, holy sh!t. :shock: :wtf:

It didn't take but a few minutes and the underground stuff kicked into over drive.
All the things that that you talked about happened, and within 5 minutes PM crashed. :sick:
Here is a the same usage pics just before PM crashed..
Screenshot - 7_29_2018 , 1_53_13 AM.png
And here is what else was going on in that time frame.
Screenshot - 7_29_2018 , 1_54_45 AM.png
PM was using almost 4.5 gigs before it crashed on this page alone.
The hard drive read and writes were huge.

This is why I use Ublock and Disconnect and ABL. :shock: Before I turned those off
the page was like any other. Let them have their way and kabam. :twisted:

I cannot find any crash report for this, nothing with appcrashview and even the event viewer
does not show anything. But it definitely crashed. :think:
Last edited by Thehandyman1957 on 2018-07-29, 11:08, edited 11 times in total.

User avatar
Moonchild
Pale Moon guru
Pale Moon guru
Posts: 35481
Joined: 2011-08-28, 17:27
Location: Motala, SE
Contact:

Re: Pale Moon is slow despite good PC specs ...

Unread post by Moonchild » 2018-07-29, 19:28

That page is choppy even on my system because of no less than 15 ads per article. Good example of a website owner trying to squeeze money with quantity of ads instead of quality. In addition there's several auto-playing videos when scrolled into view. All of this will continue to tax the browser even if you switch tabs.

I can imagine if your system isn't as beefy, that it will cause noticeable delays. the videos may also eat up your video ram causing extra painting/compositing lag.
"Sometimes, the best way to get what you want is to be a good person." -- Louis Rossmann
"Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past; wisdom is of the future." -- Native American proverb
"Linux makes everything difficult." -- Lyceus Anubite

Locked