What is the bottleneck for the my browser?

I have a laptop with

Intel i7 2720QM
Samsung SSD PM810 128GB SATA II (link to benchmark)
8GB DDR3 PC-10700 Memory CAS# Latency 6/7/8/9
My internet speed is 19 ms (Ping) 20 Mbps (Down) 4.5 Mbps (Up)

but I still experience some lags in my firefox / Google chrome when I have many tabs open, and my ram is not even half full. On another note, I also use 20+ extensions.

What is the bottleneck here? Is it the web browser not taking advantage of multiple cores? Or is the latency in the RAM? Or is it the cache in SSD?

Forethinker

Posted 2013-01-12T23:08:57.640

Reputation: 640

Perhaps look at the on-disc "RAM", however it's called. Exchange files or something. Apart from that, uuuuhm, I don't know. Maybe your graphics card is bad? – Ariane – 2013-01-12T23:16:35.040

2What is your definition of "lag"? What is it that's lagging? What else is going on in your computer? Why can the lag not be ascribed to normal network/server response time? – kreemoweet – 2013-01-13T03:49:17.630

I've tested it with nothing else running on my computer. The websites have inconsistent time. (1 second load compared to 5 second load from the same website). I have no definite evidence to back it up as a server-side, but I did test on off-peak hours. – Forethinker – 2013-01-14T21:29:40.867

@Ariane. I have done that, but 8GB is not enough for me to cache everything onto RAM and get other stuff done. The only time I run flash is when I watch an important video, but that happens rarely. I also run adblocker. – Forethinker – 2013-01-14T21:32:34.153

Answers

If anyone has a computer with a good spec, consider modifying your user.js for firefox. It will try to take advantage of your hardware / bandwidth more:

user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 8);
user_pref("content.notify.backoffcount", 5);
user_pref("plugin.expose_full_path", true);
user_pref("ui.submenuDelay", 0);
user_pref("content.interrupt.parsing", true);
user_pref("content.max.tokenizing.time", 2250000);
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 750000);
user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true);
user_pref("content.switch.threshold", 750000);
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 48);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 8);
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 65536);

I also recommend using ChromEdit addon to modify user.js.

Forethinker

Posted 2013-01-12T23:08:57.640

Reputation: 640

Try changing things one a time to see which affects the performance the most.

The first thing I'd try would be to disable the browser extensions. If this improves things then re-enable them one at a time until the performance degrades. It might be just one extension causing the problem, in which case you could remove it completely or decide to live with the performance issue if it's an extension you can't do without.

If that doesn't show anything up then try the laptop at someone else's house or your work/school etc. This will eliminate any issues with the internet connection.

You could also run some diagnostics on your memory to check it's working correctly.

From there it gets more complicated/expensive to swap memory etc. but I'd expect the problem to lie in the software rather than the hardware.

ChrisF

Posted 2013-01-12T23:08:57.640

Reputation: 39 650

Actually I have done that. I used a combination of binary and linear search on my addons and extensions. They seem to work have more or less the same behavior when I have too many tabs open. My SSD is on the slower side, don't you think it could be the bottleneck? – Forethinker – 2013-01-14T21:33:46.210

@Prometheus I seriously doubt it. Web browsing doesn't use the disc a ton. But if you want to check that anyway, disable cache entirely and see what it does on entirely new websites. Because yeah, of course, cache speeds up known websites. But I doubt it. Besides, even slow-ish SSDs beat HDDs, right? – Ariane – 2013-01-15T03:12:55.957

Yeah. I have been monitoring my web browser usage using Process Explorer. Now I suspect that my memory speed might be culprit. Firefox, for example, accumulates trillions of cycles in a day but with very low CPU usage. OTOH, The disk usage is insignificant. So I think DDR3 2133Mhz emmory would be help. – Forethinker – 2013-01-26T22:20:27.653