Browsers & resources: hw or sw issue?

[rhodius]

Hey y'all, using the available browsers from the repository, namely Chromium and Minefield21, will at some point consume huge amounts of memory and cpu according to top. My otherwise snappy and efficient TC box becomes slow and clunky when I'm browsing. TC stats sees my 1gig of Ram and my 2.8Ghz pentium cpu. Also, I have what is supposed to be a very fast cable dsl connection. I hope the above info is sufficient for my question to be considered as legit.

My question is this: does it sound like a problem with my hardware resources, or are the browsers such hogs that they snarl my otherwise speedy experience of TC? The briefest of indications as to where to look for the problem will be greatly appreciated.

[coreplayer2]

Anything wrong with using the latest firefox instead of those outdated browsers you've listed?

[rhodius]

Well, I have political issues with firefox, but we won't get into that here  I suppose I could drop my boycott long enough to see if it makes an improvement, which I did with minefield. Will I find more current firefox in the repository that i go to (http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/) when I open Apps? I don't recall seeing it there. Correction: I now see that you have packaged a firefox-ESR.tcz and firefox_getLatest.tcz. Version 38.x is fairly current, I'm sure; I'll try it.

Yeah, your top capture looks very different from the output I get right now. Thanks so much for your suggestion.

[coreplayer2]

I'd use firefox_getLatest once a month to ensure you keep up with the latest if Firefox works for you

If you frequent YouTube or Pandora  often then I'd do the same with getFlash11   But know that flash needs more recourses that you wound think







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[Juanito]

...namely Chromium and Minefield21, will at some point consume huge amounts of memory and cpu according to top.

Apart from firefox, did you try using the fifth browser?

[rhodius]

I'd use firefox_getLatest once a month to ensure you keep up with the latest if Firefox works for you

If you frequent YouTube or Pandora  often then I'd do the same with getFlash11   But know that flash needs more recourses that you wound think

Yes, I do like my Pandora Been listening to Serial on Pandora lately besides my stations. And I have been at youtube more often lookoing at Gimp tutorials, so what you say about flash will apply. I thought this box was fairly powerful compasred to some of my equipment, but I guess demands on resources have changed since I last had a wired internet connection. For instance, firefox-ESR is at 81% VSZ with a couple of tabs open right now.

Anyway, thanks for your generosity with the suggestions!

[rhodius]

Apart from firefox, did you try using the fifth browser?

No, I have not tried fifth; your mention is the first I've heard of it. I see fifth.tcz right there in the repository and will give a whirl too. Thanks very much!

[rhodius]

Juanito, thanks for the fifth suggestion. A nice surprise so far and waaay less demanding. If fifth proves reliable I could see myself using it a lot.

Sorry I started the thread in the wrong place.

[coreplayer2]

There are several browsers, but I'd have to say that you're somewhat limited with only 1GB of memory. 
Do you have a swap partition or swap file available to help out?


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[curaga]

You should consider adding more RAM if you mean to use Flash, or HTML5 streaming etc. They really are hogs.

Fifth is light, but then it doesn't support Flash, audio or video

[Rich]

Hi rhodius
Another thing you can try is Googling:

firefox reduce memory usage

Here are a couple of the results that may prove to be useful:
http://www.davidtan.org/tips-reduce-firefox-memory-cache-usage/
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/39q6xt/some_useful_firefox_tips_to_fix_choppy_scrolling/

[thane]

FWIW, I'm running Firefox on a 6 year old box with 2 G RAM and no hard disk (running everything in RAM) and haven't had any browsing issues. Granted I'm running a minimum number of apps, don't usually open many windows at a time, and exit a lot. I did have to update my opt/xfiletool.lst to keep a number of large files that Firefox creates from being backed up to USB (also set Firefox to delete history etc when I exit).

edit: I have occasionally frozen the box watching Flash videos and filling up the RAM.

[rhodius]

You should consider adding more RAM if you mean to use Flash, or HTML5 streaming etc. They really are hogs.

Yup. I recently was gifted with a cast off computer with 2Gigs RAM (twice what I did have) and the browsers (Chromium at present) are behaving much better. More RAM was the simplest answer to my original concerns

Thanks to all.