So the past few weeks have seen me getting more and more frustrated with the performance lockups in Feisty. As a developer who’s been running it for several months now, I can say I’m very tolerant and never upset, just try my best to help, mostly by just finding my own solution. So cruft and buildup is inevitable, lots of random libraries compiled out of the packaging system to get something working last minute, and I know my kernel is a wreck, as its seen more than a few major upgrades. However, when I started to read benchmarks where Feisty was taking a significant beating in startup times, I started to get concerned. I agree with the reasoning that dropping the heavily optimized kernels was a good idea, I had stopped using them a bit before, due to my own stability problems.
Anyways, this prompted me to make good use of my 500 GB external drive, and I am backing up everything as I speak, then doing an all-out optimization of my system with no regards to consequence (just for some numbers/fun 
) and then installing the beta fresh (on a LVM’ed hard drive). I hope to have something of a comprehensive optimization guide for Ubuntu after this, but whats most likely going to happen is I get ansey for the new Feisty and LVM 
However, as I started my quest for a meaner and leaner Gnome/Ubuntu harmony, I trudged through the debates on prelinks, preloads, and readaheads (do what you will, nothing fantastic either way for me). But the first thing that truly changed my day to day desktop experience and in an incredibly positive way was Swiftfox. Its nothing revolutionary in terms of ideas, its just done well. Swiftfox really isn’t even a separate distribution of Firefox, its almost the exact same code, just with highly optimized releases for each processor. My initial thoughts were that it was going to be worthless, and maybe for your processor, it is, but with the Core Duo, its a world of difference. At first I assumed it was placebo, or something else I had done, but when my benchmarks showed no real differences anywhere else, Swiftfox outpaced Firefox, by a lot.
Just for fun, I have a few links below for rough web rendering performance benchmarks, make of them what you will, but let me say, drop your composting manager first, both beryl and compiz hated me when I tried, its too many rapid refreshes.
http://scragz.com/tech/mozilla/test-rendering-time
http://celtickane.com/projects/jsspeed.php
http://www.24fun.com/downloadcenter/benchjs/benchjs.html
Feel free to share your times, either way, I’m interested to know if this was a ‘My Firefox was so messed up’ or if Swiftfox is truly that awesome nerd inside that drives the speed of software.
Technorati Tags: mozilla, firefox, swiftfox, ubuntu, gnome, linux, optimize, speed
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My times on a MacBook Core Duo 1.83Ghz (T2400):
test-rendering-time:
Epiphany: 1st load: 9.3
2nd load: 8.4
Swiftfox: 1st load: 8.8
2nd load: 8.4
Opera: 1st load: 7.4
2nd load: 1.8
Konqueror: 1st load: 7.5
2nd load:
IE6 on Wine: 1st load: 7.94
2nd load: 6.9
BenchJS:
Epiphany
1: 1.414
2: 2.305
3: 1.526
4: 1.601
5: 0.219
6: 2.163
7: 0.678
Swiftfox:
1: 1.479
2: 1.336
3: 0.48
4: 0.482
5: 0.186
6: 1.882
7: 0.669
Opera:
1: 1.255
2: 0.927
3: 0.416
4: 0.363
5: 0.13
6: 2.059
7: 0.282
Konqueror:
1: 11.711
2: 1.053
3: 2.414
4: 3.418
5: 1.751
6: 3.77
7: 1.157
IE6 on Wine:
1: 16.654
2: 76.319
3: 2.128
4: 0.864
5: 0.455
6: 5.379
7: 2.085
JSSpeed:
Epiphany: 1030
Swiftfox: 1100
Opera: 450
Konqueror: 760
IE6 on Wine: 2300
My conclusion: Swiftfox does not make much sense , the overall speed gain should barely be noticeable
..and if you really want speed: Get Opera. I use Epiphany though and do not feel slow
( I forgot to mention: all applications where from a ubuntu Feisty installation ).
Feisty Gnome has an easy tweak. Apparently it has to do with Gnome problems. http://beuno.com.ar/?p=4
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-desktop/+bug/94048
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-session/+bug/26419
Kerry S:
“This is a fix for the new system that was started back in edgy where the host name was split off to 127.0.1.1, the problem is that some applications still look for the host name @ 127.0.0.1, so to keep those applications happy and running smoothly you simple need to add the host name where those applications expect it to be.”"
Upstart is also not fully optimized yet, but they will release updated scripts by the time Feisty is released for optional download, and Feisty+1 will have em by default.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2264992#post2264992
I use swiftfox, and for me the most noticeable thing is switching tabs is much faster. The tests you have above are primarily javascript and don’t cover switching tabs at all.
Also, profile.typekey.com/trs80 didn’t work with your OpenID system – dunno if its your problem or theirs, but it does work elsewhere.
As to the OpenID thing, its probably on my end, try registering/logging in using one of the other login boxes, I’ve been having some odd redirect issues when using the ajaxified inline ones when I was trying to make my site standards compliant again.
[...] This fellow had a few benchmarks to try, and I gave the only one still up a go. Here are my results by browser (key: I ran the test three times, with the format “first render” | “refresh” | “close browser and render again”): http://scragz.com/archived/mozilla/test-rendering-time [...]