Re: CURRENT: bad performance in LibreWolf, Firefox, mplayer

On Thu, 28 Aug 2025 17:01:08 +0200
A FreeBSD User <freebsd@walstatt-de.de> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> running CURRENT (FreeBSD 15.0-PRERELEASE #3 master-n279925-393356f25fb8: Thu Aug 28 06:53:41
> CEST 2025 amd64) on a moderat modern hardware (AMD based), I whitness some very strange and
> nasty performance issues with the usage of certain "day-to -day" applications, like Firefox,
> LibreWolf, mplayer.
> 
> CPU is a current AMD Ryzen (no 3D cache!), 96 GB RAM, GPU is a nVida RX 5060 - with recent
> nvidia-driver-580.76.05.1500063 driver version due to issues with the 570 series in ports
> tree. X11 window manager is x11-wm/windowmaker. All ports are custom compiled and has been
> recently recompiled - these details just for the record.
> 
> The phenomenon is when starting Firefox and/or Librewolf, these programs are almost unusable.
> Clicking on menus  produce drop down artefacts in the shape of the drop-down-menu when moving
> the window. Content of the interior does not change and is frozen and/or doesn't get
> refreshed. After several long minutes this misbehaviour seems to mitigate and the program
> seems mor responsive. When it comes to video streams, like youtube, the mess is back: streams
> are slowed down a way its like a torture watching them. Same with videos in mplayer: playing a
> video we made a couple of years ago with Blender (.mkv, .avi) are in slow motion. From time to
> time I try my best with warzone2100 - the game also indicates sometimes while in game a sudden
> jumpy behaviour or at the beginning. It seems erratic when and how such "jumpiness"  occurs. 
> 
> While those applications show up harsh and serious performance problems, the OS itself and
> even the X11 windowmaker window system do not indicate any flaw in performance penalties,
> which surprises me.
> 
> So, I susepct something wrong with either the video subsystem (as mentioned initially, the
> in-ports-tree driver nvidia 570 shows some similar problems which could be mitigated by using
> the most recent one provided by nvidia, version 580.76.05).

Hi. Replying partially.

The in-tree version of the nvidia driver sets are already at 580.76.05

  https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/commit/?id=9dbf8452e1fbb8e075b0f8d978fe9be9d0df9355

on main (aka latest) branch of ports tree 10 days ago.

But it would NOT be merged into 2025Q3 as it does not contain security
fixes nor build fixes (so we don't requested approval of portmgr to
do so).


> I tried to recompile every single port from scratch due to suspect some ABI issues somewhere
> since some critical changes in FreeBSD's core, but this approach didn't help much.
> 
> Does anybody else have such problems on the recent CURRENT system and is this well-known (and
> so the hope for a solution does not die early) or is this problem sticky with me alone?

Not sure if it's case for you unless the problem is happening from
much earlier days, but if you see cores of your WM after the slowness
dissappeared, try disabling tab thumbnailing of firefox (and its
derivatives). For firefox, in aout:config window, setting

  browser.tabs.hoverPreview.enabled
  browser.tabs.hoverPreview.showThumbnails

to false.

For me, after firefox started showing thumbnails of tabs,
it caused compiz to crash (unusable until generation of core
is finished, but after that, compiz stop working but underlying
[for my config] Mate is still working).

I've found above as I didn't experience this problem
unless I mouse-over the any of tabs.


HTH.


> Thanks for the patience,
> 
> oh
> 
> -- 
> 
> A FreeBSD user


-- 
Tomoaki AOKI    <junchoon@dec.sakura.ne.jp>