Initial start of TenFourFox
I noticed on my G5 that when I start TenFourFox, I get several seconds of hard drive activity while waiting for the browser to become functional. Ten seconds of very busy read/write noise. Never saw that behavior with my other browsers, they pretty much start up instantly and quietly. Boot up to function time: Safari: two to four sec., Stainless, same, Opera, about six sec., iCab, two to three sec., Camino, 5 sec., SeaMonkey the same. Wondering why this is happening only with TenFour Fox. My machine has plenty of RAM, Activity Monitor reports over 3 GB free when running tests.
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Support Staff 1 Posted by Chris (chtrusch... on 08 Nov, 2012 12:31 AM
Robert, this can have many reasons. It may be related to reading databases at startup (and Safari does this as well on my G4 PowerBook, sometimes taking close to a minute before I can use it). You could try TenFourFox 17 beta, which is a lot faster than 10.0 reading e.g. the database that contains bookmarks. You could also try starting the browser with add-ons disabled to see if an extension causes the slowdown.
Support Staff 2 Posted by Cameron Kaiser on 08 Nov, 2012 02:07 AM
The reasons Chris mentioned all apply, but the biggest one is that as of Firefox 5 Mozilla requires all of its internal libraries to be linked into a superlibrary called XUL. This library is quite large and makes up the majority of Firefox/TenFourFox; the G5 version is over 40MB in size. When the application starts up, this superlibrary is scanned and this does indeed read quite a bit all at once from the hard disk. The other browsers amortize this over several smaller libraries, which don't all load at once.
The advantage to XUL is that a certain amount of overhead code can be dispensed with since everything is in one place, and all the browser features are immediately available once XUL has finished loading. That said, even if we didn't have those consolations, there's nothing we can do about it; Firefox 5+ (and indeed any current Gecko) won't work any other way.
3 Posted by Robert Bowers on 08 Nov, 2012 02:47 AM
Thanks. It all makes sense. And yes, once it loads the browser is
quick and responsive.
Support Staff 4 Posted by Cameron Kaiser on 08 Nov, 2012 03:29 PM
Excellent. Feel free to reopen this ticket if you had any other questions related to it (just reply and it will be reopened; otherwise, no further reply is needed).
Cameron Kaiser closed this discussion on 08 Nov, 2012 03:29 PM.