Serious Performance Regression in Firefox 18 and newer

February 27th, 2013 by Stephen Bannasch

The Firefox performance regression introduced into the codebase on 2012-09-29 and present in FF v18, v19, and Nightly versions is much more serious than I previously thought.

Basically FF versions after v16 are now almost unusable running NextGen models of any complexity for longer than 30s.

See: Firefox Performance Comparison 20131902 and Confirmation of FF slowdown over time.

There are several active Mozilla issues that people are working on. This is my original bug report:

And the other bug reports resolving this issue depends on:

Share|

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2013 at 12:21 am and is filed under Development Blog, Modeling, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Serious Performance Regression in Firefox 18 and newer”

  1. Steven Wood Says:
    May 11th, 2013 at 5:07 am

    You can see the poor performance of FF SVG here :

    http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/950642

    It works great on IE9+, Chrome – but on FF 20 it is so slow as to be almost unusable. I would assume when this demo was created it probably worked on the then current version of FF ?

    [Reply to this Comment]

    Stephen Bannasch Reply:
    May 13th, 2013 at 12:37 pm

    Hi Steven,

    Recently Firefox developers have been making changes to improve the SVG performance issue.

    So far these issues are only available in the Nightly versions of Firefox.

    On Firefox v20 on my computer that example from Mike Bostock takes almost 60s to settle down.

    However on Firefox 23.0a1 (2013-05-13) (the latest Nightly release) it talkes only about 12s to settle down.

    For comparison on Chrome v25 it takes about 6s.

    So it looks like when v23 is released the performance issues should be better.

    [Reply to this Comment]

Leave a Comment