Memory/CPU Usage and Disk I/O

[Herman Strange]

System ... Windows 7/64, 16GB Ram, Core i7-2600

Have two installations of Pale Moon x64 v.12, one standard install and one "Portable". Same Extensions/Plug-Ins in both browsers. Home page set to http://start.palemoon.org in both browsers. Standard install is significantly slower at startup, browsing pages, and pretty much anything else than portable install. Wondering if any of these differences might point to something?

Portable installation:
Memory - 61,508K memory
I/O Reads - 604
I/O Writes - 776
I/O Other - 9,859
I/O Read Bytes - 10,779,159
I/O Write Bytes - 4,435,637
I/O Other Bytes - 137,179

Standard installation:
Memory - 66,912K memory
I/O Reads - 3,234
I/O Writes - 1,388
I/O Other - 10,337
I/O Read Bytes - 57,993,931
I/O Write Bytes - 13,575,250
I/O Other Bytes - 137,179

Any thoughts or suggestions?

[Moonchild]

The portable differs in two essential ways: it doesn't use safebrowsing and it doesn't use disk cache. In all other respects, it is exactly the same as the desktop browser. Your I/O and memory differences easily account for that difference. It is possible (but not likely) that either of these two cause slowdowns on your particular setup.
If you are using an older profile in the desktop version (especially if it was "grandfathered" into its current state from a Firefox import and several upgrades) then the slowdowns can be caused by an excessively large history database or other oddities in the sqlite database files used by the browser.
Try the "placescleaner" add-on to clean up and compact your history database, and see if that helps any.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... escleaner/

[Herman Strange]

The profile was migrated from an older version of FF so that may well be part of it. As for disk cache, I made the .ini file changes in PM Portable to enable disk caching for it, suppose though there may still be differences in other related settings (cache size, entries, etc.). Thanks for the tip on placescleaner, will certainly give it a shot!

[Herman Strange]

I found the performance difference. As it turns out I had disabled IPv6 in the Portable version, so all was not equal after all. Disabling it in the standard desktop version seems to have brought the performance back up to where it was previously. Just wanted to report back in case the information is useful to others at some point. Thanks for your help!

[Moonchild]

Yes, if you don't have a working IPv6 setup, it's best to disable it in the browser to prevent unnecessary failed lookups, etc.

For the record: set network.dns.disableIPv6 to true in about:config