Pale Moon response speed under miserable ping times

[Scavengre]

Yes, I know, it's my Satellite connection. No, NOT Elon's Starlink - Excede / Viasat's geosynchronous connection, and yes, I will never get better than 500ms ping time (tell that to Albert Einstein). But does Pale Moon have to be so pathetically slow waiting for network responses when they're half a second per? And they add up!

Thanks, all. Perhaps there's a setting I could configure? S.

Operating system:Win7
Browser version:34.2.2
32-bit or 64-bit browser?:64
Problem URL:All
Browser theme (if not default):
Installed add-ons:Adblock L 5.0.9, Dismiss the Overlay 1.0.7, Speed Dial 5.0.0, nMatrix 5.2.0
Installed plugins: (about:plugins):

If possible, please include the output of help->troubleshooting information (as text):

**PASTE troubleshooting information here**

[BenFenner]

Are you trying to describe situations where the UI seemingly hangs during most traditional network activity?

[Scavengre]

Pretty much, yeah. It can take seconds after a right-click for the right-click menu to appear. Clicking to close a tab can leave it sitting there for some time. Closing windows, opening menus, &c, and sometimes it just misinterprets clicks entirely onto something else.

Real-time feedback typing into dialog boxes, like this one, is highly flaky - it reminds me of dialup, where you'd write everything in a text editor then cut and paste because fixing typoes was so fantastically tedious online. I've recovered an old bad habit of mine, typing "ZZ" just to be absolutely clear what the last characters actually received were.

As an aside, this is the same old satellite I've had for more than ten years now - and Pale Moon wasn't nearly this bad earlier.

Thanks, S.

eta: PS - Dunno if it helps, but I sometimes see 'not responding' in the top toolbar briefly - as if it's crashed. S.

[BenFenner]

Does it behave responsively when zero network activity is happening?

[Moonchild]

Real-time feedback typing into dialog boxes, like this one, is highly flaky

But the forum's post input boxes do not provide real-time feedback by contacting the server (on keypress or what not) unlike some "modern media" sites that literally want to track your typing behaviour. So if it responds sluggishly, then that is because of something else (locally), not networking.
Providing us with the full troubleshooting information as asked in the template would likely help.

Go to Help -> Troubleshooting information... and use the copy-to-clipboard button on top of that page to copy the text, then paste in your reply.

[Scavengre]

On its way:

Application Basics
------------------

Name: Pale Moon
Version: 34.2.2 (64-bit)
Build ID: 20260429154903
Update Channel: release
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Diagnostics
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AzureContentBackend: direct2d 1.1
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--- Hope that will help. S.

[Moonchild]

Thanks.

What immediately stands out to me is that you're using extremely old graphics drivers while using hardware acceleration in the browser. This can cause severe performance issues.
Please update your drivers to the latest available for both your Intel HD graphics integrated GPU and your NVidia Quadro-M GPU. See if that helps with your issues. If still problematic, to rule out more graphics acceleration related issues, try running the browser with hardware acceleration disabled (Preferences -> Advanced -> tab "General") so it will use the CPU for compositing in most cases.

[Scavengre]

Fixed!!

Thanks. I tried turning off 'hardware acceleration', but if it made any improvement it wasn't clear. I closed and re-opened Pale Moon, hard to tell. I'd closed all tabs, all windows, restarted Pale Moon, still flaky.

But:

On general principle, I rebooted the whole computer. Oddly enough, it asked for a CHKDSK. Okay, off you go. It didn't seem to find much, then rebooted perfectly normally. Then something strange happened: I restarted Pale Moon, and suddenly it popped up a long-forgotten page full of tabs! It had not appeared in dozens of previous restarts of Pale Moon - but did when restarting the computer. Closing that window (with its nine tabs) seems to have made a vast improvement!

Somehow a page that was supposed to get recovered(?) got jammed(?), and then started eating up all my IO. No, I have no idea why, and I have no idea how to replicate this behavior. It may have had something to do with a failed shutdown some weeks ago (the power went) but everything seemed to run fine for some time after that.

Anyhow, seems happier (much happier!!) now. Thanks for everything! Scav.

PS - Updating the NVIDIA drivers through their little control panel didn't work. My next step was going to be trying to install updates manually, but I have to be careful that they'll still run under Win7, and it does seem the problem's fixed for now. Also next test is turn 'hardware acceleration' back on again - will get back to you on that. S.

eta PPS - Seems to work fine with HW accel turned back on, too. So it was Pale Moon - as a sort of zombie Pale Moon. Weird - but working now! Whee! S.

[Hugo Oberstein]

Hello Scavengre, that was an odd situation. It does seem that something was going on with Pale Moon and it's processor usage. You also mentioned it wanting to run chkdsk. It is possible that Pale Moon may had a recovery session in mind but could not load it because of a bad sector or cluster on the drive.

However you mentioned it seemed to be OK for weeks. Something during this diagnosis triggered the chkdsk to be flagged. Do you normally reboot your computer every day or two or do you reboot say once a month? If you reboot infrequently you might want to add a reboot or two just for good measure every so often.

The part that had me thinking this is not network was the "right-click menu sluggishness" since that is local as MoonChild mentioned. The next time you have an similar issue go to Task Manager, look at the performance tab and see how much RAM is in use. Then click on the Processes tab and see what program is using a high CPU count and/or memory. With that information you can pursue finding out what may be happening.

Also, I would like to suggest that people should run a chkdsk (Scandisk or "Scan for Disk Errors") at least once a year, and especially after a power outage.

I am very happy you got your PC and Pale Moon operating properly again. It was a weird one.

[Bilbo47]

This issue reminds me of a probably-related thing with UXP browsers other than, or possibly including, PM. Steps from a browsing session:
- close all tabs
- close browser
- wait 3 seconds
- open browser
expected: browser opens showing only one blank tab
problem: browser opens showing one (or more?) tab(s) that were previously closed before closing the browser - either from the most recent session or from some session before that.

At first I thought this was a bug/weirdness only in Borealis, but then it happened also in Basilisk and maybe PM. Anyway this report is only an observation.

Also the thread kinda makes sense like there was a hidden zombie PM process running while a visible PM process was also running. The hidden copy had a ton of active tabs which were slowing down all processes in the computer that use the resources that PM-processes use.

[Moonchild]

Shutdown of browsers isn't instant. It's an asynchronous process and if you rapid-fire re-open the browser it may actually interrupt the shutdown process and open a new window in the still-running process. That isn't ideal but it's a very complex process to cleanly shut down the browser and commit everything to the open profile. This is also hampered if the JS engine has trouble cleaning up all the cruft from websites that had been opened in the browser. This kind of thing isn't ideal, of course, but will require re-architecturing of some core parts to solve.

[Scavengre]

@ M. Oberstein:

Yeah, I tend to reboot once in a blue moon or so (hey, there just was one!! Perhaps the galaxy is trying to tell me something. ). Generally I just leave it up and running.

@ All:

In re. power outages: This particular machine (the one running Pale Moon, and the same I'm using now) is a laptop in a docking station. When the power goes, so goeth the external monitors and all the ancillary bits, but the battery in the laptop automatically switches on and takes over (Built-in UPS!). That said, the battery's very old and creaky, and has less than five minutes of run time - just long enough to (one hopes) successfully save one's work and safely shut down.

Something like that happened. Pale Moon wasn't quite able to shut down correctly and/or completely, and so some page got stuck. Then, over time, it ate more and more of my I/O - that I don't understand - until it became so intolerable that I popped on here to grumble about it. Turns out it wasn't the ping times that were the problem - oh, they're problems enough on their own - but an oddball overlap between multiple things trying to do the same thing twice. With a bit of cleaning, all came out quite well.

Thanks again for your support and helpful hints. If nothing else, perhaps when someone else manages to scare up the same problem, my experience might prove useful. Carry on, all of you! S.

[BopBe]

I added "Palemoon.exe" to ProcessHacker (which is always running in my tray) process notification system a long time ago exactly for the reason Moonchild mentioned above: occasionally the browser might take a while to clean after itself after telling it to shutdown, and my biggest fear is to run into somesort of a race condition where I start a new instance of the browser before the previous instance exited cleanly, and lose any of the permanent data storage I value so much (tabs, cookies, login data, etc).

Granted, I don't think I have seen recent-ish (as in 5~7yrs) iterations of palemoon taking extraordinaire time to shutdown, but my browsing habits are fairly mundane. YMMV.

[Moonchild]

my biggest fear is to run into somesort of a race condition where I start a new instance of the browser before the previous instance exited cleanly, and lose any of the permanent data storage I value so much

Pale Moon does guard against this by locking the profile. If you try to start on a profile that's marked "in use" it will give you an error message.

permanent data storage ... tabs

Keep in mind that open tabs are not necessarily "permanent". They are by their nature transient and unless you explicitly save them by e.g. bookmarking, sessions of open tabs can occasionally get lost.