Posted by texas-bronius on March 10, 2010 at 9:02pm
I'm still developing on Windows Vista, but the machine is a Core 2 Duo (Dell D830) with 4GB ram. So I think the hardware is plenty beefy. I run WAMP locally, and use Firefox for development. Sometimes I have to open upwards of 15+ tabs (scroll-click Edit in the /content/node screen, anyone?), but even when I don't, very often, I find that I am spending a LOT of time waiting for my browser to catch up.
I can't tell if it's Vista or Firefox.
Does anyone in Linux developing against localhost experience these kinds of frustrations?
-Bronius
Comments
What exactly do you mean by
What exactly do you mean by catch up?
I develop on on my OS X mac book pro with similar stats, and test with firefox there is sometimes a page load delay. I attribute it to the plethora of plug-ins i am running: Web Developer, Firebug, YSlow, S3fox, Ghostery.
I mean I click Submit at the
I mean I click Submit at the bottom of one Node Edit page, CTRL-TAB to the next open, and repeat a few times until finally the whole browser just white-screens briefly. Sometimes I might be able to pull up another browser (IE or Safari), but that's hugely laggy at that point, too.
I just wish I knew where the bottleneck is: maybe increasing mysql connections or apache threads in WAMP would help?
I am almost certain you
I am almost certain you cannot be taxing either apache or mysql to the point that it would cause this delay. After all, even if you have 15 tabs going, chances are you are not pushing more than a couple requests per second.
Is your firefox bare or enhanced with plugins?
I get similar freezeups, the screen doesnt go white, but firefox quits responding and i get the apple spinning - thinking thing.
Yep, that sounds like what
Yep, that sounds like what I'm seeing. My ff isn't bare bones, but you've given me a great idea: maybe with another profile I could launch two side-by-side when necessary? I love ff tabbed browsing better than in any other browser I've tried. Most times I don't need firebug/yslow/colorzilla, etc active all the time, but I need them enough not to disable them..
I used to have lots of
I used to have lots of problems with firefox on ubuntu slowing down, or graying out, but the new version seems pretty good so far.
Here, have a look at what I'm
Here, have a look at what I'm dealing with.. Someone cry for me:
http://qik.com/video/5398736
I had that exact problem
I had that exact problem you're describing on my development machine running Mac OSX. Checking in the background with top, I found that on clicks where firefox had to process javascript, if the browser window had been open a while, it could consume up to 80% of my cpu cycles and over 700M of memory. This spiked all the time when using tools like firebug. Basically the more javascript stuff it had to run, the slower it got over time.
On top of that, just passively sitting around FF was chewing up about 500M of memory. This is only a problem on my work machine though, as my laptop with no extensions installed has no issue. I've started closing out FF completely about once an hour, and this seems to keep the problem under control. Making sure I keep the number of tabs down helped as well. This is just anecdotal though, it's not like I've cracked open gdb and started searching for bottlenecks.
Also if you want to know for sure that it's not apache that's slowing down, open up a terminal window, type in 'top', then look at the processes named 'firefox-bin' and 'httpd' (or 'apache' if you have a weird config).
http://empoweredby.net
Localhost + FF probs? PC Yes, Mac No
Ironically, a couple weeks ago when Robert Douglass was here, both Robert and I were running OS X with both Safari and Firefox, and did not notice any problems. But both Ali and Truyen were on PCs (Ali eventually changed back to her Macbook), and had all kinds of problems. We were all running localhosts using Acquia Drupal stack installer.
I'll see if Truyen has any thoughts on this and get him to post a followup. All I can say is "yes, we saw problems with the PCs, but not with the Macs." it got so bad, Truyen and Ali even started saying, "come on little turtle, you can do it..." while waiting for updates to process (new modules / configs / posts / etc)...
Oh by the way, AWESOME string quartet video there Bronius. I used to play violin and string bass when I was younger. Now you're making me want to pick it up again. My wife uses to play violin but would love to get a cello. Maybe we could talk for a few minutes before or after our next Houston Group Meet-Up :)
(down in the NASA-JSC area)
Not to diss the mac fanboys
We're mostly a Mac OS X shop with an external staging server (that is to say, not xAMP) and I still see the issue on all of our machines. That rules out (or at least minimizes) the effect of the local server. I always attributed it to firebug and other ff plugins attaching to all the activity on the page. I also believe I see less of an issue in non ff browsers, but then I spend the lion's share of my time in ff for the tools. Those of you at the last meetup saw the effect on my laptop (connecting to our staging server just around the corner). While not debilitating, it's certainly annoying. I'm not experiencing delays as long as you are though.
Of note, many of us do our development with CSS and JS optimization turned off. Which means 50+ separate connections per page load, then a bunch of pageload scriptage. Add to that that many of the administrative changes we make will flush caches causing page reloads.
In thinking about it, I wonder if the browser cache is fragmented. Since this isn't an isolated issue, it may be worth investigating.
PC or LABTOP + IE: seem to be OK!
Hi Stuart_e and all,
We did have problem of delay when running with WAMP + firefox. Especially whenever go to modules listed pages, enable new modules, configure anything, etc. We have to wait for such a long time.
Surprising! When I try it with WAMP + IE (8), the performance is much better than with firefox.
So you can try to see whether it work.
Truyen
Windows Updates download and apply
By the way.. I forgot to mention that I have suspected Windows Update as a culprit here as well. I can't substantiate it, but since it's one of the irksome things about Windows, I just lump it in with this. When I am most frustrated by this crazy window pane flashdance, shortly thereafter I tend to find a Windows Update awaiting installation. And of course they always manage to come right as I hedge deadlines.