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[Solved]Fresh Stretch install on SSD,Firefox is laggy/slower

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ravisista
Posts: 62
Joined: 2009-02-24 14:03

[Solved]Fresh Stretch install on SSD,Firefox is laggy/slower

#1 Post by ravisista »

I have a Dell Inspiron 14R (purchased in 2012) - later upgraded to 8GB RAM. Recently I bought a 250GB SanDisk Plus SSD and installed it in the CD/DVD slot using HD Caddy. Installed Windows 10 and Debian 9 afresh on the SSD. While installing Debian 9, reused /home (which was already a separate partition on HDD) as is. After all said and done, Windows 10 is amazingly fast (both in startup and when in operation). But that doesn't help me at all as I use Debian almost all the time. That's where the issue is.

When I start Firefox in Debian it takes up almost 50% of the CPU. And even while running with couple of tabs (nothing fancy - regular websites), it freezes intermittenly, lags in reponse and in general painfully slow(er). None of these issues existed when everything was on HDD. I even tried to move everything related to mozilla in /home (/home/<user>/.mozilla and /home/<user>/.cache) over to SSD - still no change in performance.

I looked all over these forums and on internet, but couldn't really find any articles that match my issues. Any pointers would be appreciated. Thanks!
Last edited by ravisista on 2018-09-17 11:01, edited 2 times in total.

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debiman
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Re: Moved / from HDD to SSD, Firefox is laggy/slower

#2 Post by debiman »

are there any other problems/lagging that would indicate that something went wrong with the change?
or is it only firefox?
how did you do the change? walk us through it.
put code snippets (commands and their output) in code tags please.

ravisista
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Re: Moved / from HDD to SSD, Firefox is laggy/slower

#3 Post by ravisista »

I didn't check anything else as 95% of the time I use this laptop for web browsing. So firefox is my bread and butter on this.
Not sure what code changes you want me to post here. As I said, it was a fresh install of Debian 9 onto the SSD. Along came Firefox with that install.
If there are specific commands that you want me to run, I can do that. Thanks.

ravisista
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Re: Moved / from HDD to SSD, Firefox is laggy/slower

#4 Post by ravisista »

debiman wrote:are there any other problems/lagging that would indicate that something went wrong with the change?
or is it only firefox?
how did you do the change? walk us through it.
put code snippets (commands and their output) in code tags please.
I think I understand the confusion based on my subject. Fixed it, hope it's clearer now. Thanks.

Bulkley
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Re: Fresh Stretch install on SSD, Firefox is laggy/slower

#5 Post by Bulkley »

So the question is, Is the problem the result of the SSD or by the fresh install of Debian 9?

ravisista
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Re: Fresh Stretch install on SSD, Firefox is laggy/slower

#6 Post by ravisista »

Bulkley wrote:So the question is, Is the problem the result of the SSD or by the fresh install of Debian 9?
If it was an issue with SSD, Windows 10 should suffer too, right? As I mentioned, Windows 10 is amazingly fast(er) than what it was when on HDD. Just as expected. All performance tests run against SSD came out positive - so I have to believe SSD is fine.

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bw123
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Re: Fresh Stretch install on SSD, Firefox is laggy/slower

#7 Post by bw123 »

...
All performance tests run against SSD came out positive - so I have to believe SSD is fine.
...
You should post the results of the performance tests, many people find them interesting. (Like me)

You say you didn't test anything but the browser in debian, because 95% of the time that is what you use the computer for. You say windows is faster and I'm wondering why you ran the performance tests on windows? But not on debian, even though you say you use Debian almost all the time.

I also have a sandisk ssd and it's been pretty much flawless for a couple yrs so far so good. Here's a link to their forums, not very active, but there are some decent threads there about setup. http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/SanDisk-SS ... k-SSD-Plus
http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detai ... mendations

The last few yrs I find FF ESR to be slow myself, and getting worse. It doesn't seem to matter whether it's on HDD or SSD, it's slow. If you still have the HDD setup, maybe you should use that until you figure out what is happening to your new debian install, or maybe clone it to the SSD?
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ravisista
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Re: Fresh Stretch install on SSD, Firefox is laggy/slower

#8 Post by ravisista »

bw123 wrote:
...
All performance tests run against SSD came out positive - so I have to believe SSD is fine.
...
You should post the results of the performance tests, many people find them interesting. (Like me)

You say you didn't test anything but the browser in debian, because 95% of the time that is what you use the computer for. You say windows is faster and I'm wondering why you ran the performance tests on windows? But not on debian, even though you say you use Debian almost all the time.
The reason I ran it from Wndows 10, is that Sandisk Dashboard utility is available only in Windows 10. I didn't see any such utility from Linux. There's a report it generates but it's extensive with running processes etc. which I don't want to post here. But I have attached the overall health status of the SSD as reported by the Dashboard tool. https://imgur.com/a/EhJmSmT
I also have a sandisk ssd and it's been pretty much flawless for a couple yrs so far so good. Here's a link to their forums, not very active, but there are some decent threads there about setup. http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/SanDisk-SS ... k-SSD-Plus
http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detai ... mendations

The last few yrs I find FF ESR to be slow myself, and getting worse. It doesn't seem to matter whether it's on HDD or SSD, it's slow. If you still have the HDD setup, maybe you should use that until you figure out what is happening to your new debian install, or maybe clone it to the SSD?
That would be the absolute last option but my current priority is to fix the firefox performance on SSD without resorting to such drastic measures. I am willing to move around some stuff, looking for some tweaks etc. Thanks.

Wheelerof4te
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Re: Fresh Stretch install on SSD, Firefox is laggy/slower

#9 Post by Wheelerof4te »

You didn't mention if you use older Firefox 52 ESR which comes in Debian 9 or the version from Mozilla. If it's former, then yes the performance will be lower since new Firefox Quantum is much faster overall.

So, your problem is with Firefox version, not Debian itself. New ESR version should come soon on Debian, so just wait for Security team to push the update.

ravisista
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Re: Fresh Stretch install on SSD, Firefox is laggy/slower

#10 Post by ravisista »

Wheelerof4te wrote:You didn't mention if you use older Firefox 52 ESR which comes in Debian 9 or the version from Mozilla. If it's former, then yes the performance will be lower since new Firefox Quantum is much faster overall.

So, your problem is with Firefox version, not Debian itself. New ESR version should come soon on Debian, so just wait for Security team to push the update.
Thanks. I am using out of the box Firefox (52.9.0 ESR) that comes from Debian 9. Should I try uninstalling it and install directly the Firefox Quantum from Mozilla website or should I rather wait for the official version? Thanks.

ravisista
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Re: Fresh Stretch install on SSD, Firefox is laggy/slower

#11 Post by ravisista »

Wheelerof4te wrote:You didn't mention if you use older Firefox 52 ESR which comes in Debian 9 or the version from Mozilla. If it's former, then yes the performance will be lower since new Firefox Quantum is much faster overall.

So, your problem is with Firefox version, not Debian itself. New ESR version should come soon on Debian, so just wait for Security team to push the update.
But again if there's a problem with Firefox version itself, why didn't I see it when I was on HDD. Unless there's a known performance issue with Firefox 52 ESR on SSD's?

Wheelerof4te
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Re: Fresh Stretch install on SSD, Firefox is laggy/slower

#12 Post by Wheelerof4te »

^Firefox 52 ESR was also very slow on my Broadwell-based laptop with HDD. It would use about 70% of CPU when watching Youtube videos, and was slow in general. I was not surprised, since it is old version, and web changes quickly. New Quantum based ESR will be faster.
ravisista wrote: Should I try uninstalling it and install directly the Firefox Quantum from Mozilla website
You can either wait for new version to hit repo, or just download it directly from Mozilla, even the latest version:
https://wiki.debian.org/Firefox#Firefox ... nd_Nightly

EDIT: Nevermind, the new ESR is here:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-securit ... 00217.html

ravisista
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Re: Fresh Stretch install on SSD, Firefox is laggy/slow

#13 Post by ravisista »

After the latest security update which ugpraded to Firefox-ESR 52.x, firefox seems faster. Even though the initial high CPU spike when starting it up exists, overall I have to say the latest Firefox makes my laptop usable. Marking the thread solved. Thanks to all who responded.

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