On Wednesday 11 December 2024 05:35:20 pm Bret Busby wrote: > On 12/12/24 06:01, Van Snyder wrote: > > On Thu, 2024-12-12 at 05:32 +0800, Bret Busby wrote: > >>> The symptom remains that if I kill firefox and restart it, things run a > >>> lot faster for a few hours, and then bog down again.
Been reading this thread with some interest, as I too have had some issues. > >> I believe that 4GB of RAM is now not enough for web browsing, especially > >> with web browsing involving javascript. This machine has 8GB of RAM in it, and I'm thinking at this point that something a bit newer with perhaps 32GB might be just the thing. I had a fair number of tabs open, and solved the problem partially by copying the URLs of a bunch of them into a text file and then closing them. I've also been running the noscript plugin, which gives me a bit of trouble sometimes, but then I just tell it to allow javascript on the particular page I'm trying to access and go from there. > >> Whether you continue to use Firefox, if you can, I suggest that you > >> upgrade your RAM, to as much as your motherboard will take. I could perhaps go a little higher in this box, but then I'm also looking at some heavy CPU usage, it often bogs down. And my lady tells me that xmas is coming... > >> Whilst I do not know what the pricing of RAM is like, now, it was, a while > >> ago, > >> quite inexpensive, and, a desktop computer that I bought, with an i3 > >> CPU, was upgraded to 32GB of RAM, as soon as I could, after buying it, > >> and, it has run well with that. Sounds good to me. (...) > I believe that cellphones nowadays start with about 4GB RAM. Mine's got 6GB, plus I have a memory card in there for "stuff", adding 256GB of storage to it. Something like 11% of that is currently used. > A possibility, depending on computer pricing, where you are, and, the > pricing of refurbished computers, is to consider buying a refurbished > computer. There''s a thought. I'm not sure who's selling refurbished computers, but then there's the question of how much of a warranty you get with it. Or I could just buy a MB and build one. > The computer that I am currently using (it is, I believe, my most robust > computer, and so, it is the only computer, apart from a cheap tablet > computer that I am using a couple of times a day, due to electricity > supply problems (I have a big UPS, which is faulty, so, I am not > confident to use my other computers) ), has a Xeon CPU and 128GB RAM. Oh my. > In Firefox, amongst the other add-ons, I have Bluhell Firewall, uBlock > Origin (I recommend those two , together, as a minimum) , AdBlocker > Ultimate, AdGuard AdBlocker, AdBlock Plus, and, I think that is all f > the ab blocking and anti-tracking and general privacy add-ons that I > have. I have privacy badger, ublock origin, adblock plus, and noscript currently. > They, together, can slow Firefox, but the combination of Firefox, > and, javascript, are what slows down the use of Firefox. javascript, > malignantly applied as client-side processing, rather than more > properly, server-side processing, is like pouring sugar into the fuel > tank of a petrol-fuelled car. The noscript add-on made a lot of difference here. (...) > So, it could be worth you investing in a refurbished computer with a > powerful CPU and lots of RAM; preferably at least 64GB, to provide for > the future (well, the next couple of years). That's crazy... > Another suggestion for you, is to switch to a less resource-demanding > desktop environment. It's xfce for me, here. And a very old version of KDE in a virtualbox VM, which is where I do my email. > I do not know what its status is now, but, from memory, KDE used to be > the most resource-demanding desktop environment. The last time I looked at it, it was a real hog. > I use the MATE desktop environment, with a deprecated MATE interface, I have some DVDs burned with downloaded copies of various versions, some of which include that. I plan to play around with it on some of the laptops I have around the place. (...) > fvwm was the first Linux desktop environment that I used, on Slackware, and, > I think, Red > Hat (about 4 or 5), about 25 years ago, before a kindly person showed me > Debian (which was about 3.0, I think), and, the wonders of apt. I started with Slackware back in 1999, and run it on my server currently, and on one of the laptops. > The web sites that you access, can also have a considerable effect on > your computer's performance. One web site, that I now access only on the > tablet PC, through an Android app for the web site, is the Weather > Underground - wunderground.com, for weather status and forecasts > monitoring. I'm familiar with that, and in fact have a weather station here that's tied into that network. > That web site would persistently crash whatever web browser > I would be using to access it, and, because of the ominous effects, > would take down whatever computer I would use to access the web site. It > would cause the computer to freeze, so I would have to power off the > computer, and, reboot it. Interesting, it doesn't do that here. My lady accesses it on her computer all the time. I do so on my phone occasionally. She's never had a problem with it. She's running Mint on her machine, I don't recall which desktop offhand. -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin
