Convergence slowing down browsing?

[nbkuy]

Since I'm here, I might as well report another problem which is probably specific to my browser setup but might affect other users as well. The thing is i've noticed Convergence blocks Firefox addons that require DNS requests to function properly like Flagfox, and this, in consequence, translates into slower blowsing. I don't want to generalise but my Gmail is switching to basic HTML to often these days.

[moxie0]

Alright, so you're reporting that Convergence is slowing down other addons, which are slowing down FF generally? I can't think of how Convergence would influence DNS requests, what are you seeing?

[Lcstyle]

At least now with 0.06 you get a prompt telling you if a notary is failing for whatever reason. Keep in mind notary majority consensus means convergence will need to check with each notary. if one of those is down then the connection stops until a timeout is reached where the error is displayed. This could slow down browsing significantly. This goes back to my point, notary servers that are unreachable should be disabled or replaced with notaries that are running.

[nbkuy]

I'm going to leave the technical stuff for you guys and try to give description as acurate as possible. The slowdown issue I experienced is with Gmail (and maybe with Twitter but Twitter conditions vary so much I can't be sure) that now enters into HTML mode by default due to slowdown. I didn't get any prompts or error messages from Convergence. I have installed Flagfox that you can download from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flagfox/ and if I recall correctly, Flagfox gave me a message saying "unable to perform DNS request" (or similar) and right now on mouse over it gives me the message "No local DNS acess". Maybe I'm reporting two issues, I can't be sure since I have no way to debug.

[ghost]

I can confirm that Gmail and Google+ are terribly slow with Convergence. Regarding Flagfox: Yes, there is an issue. I'll try to translate the error message from my German FF:

"You current proxy settings don't permit local DNS requests. (network.proxy.socks_remote_dns) Flagfox uses an internal IP addresses database to look up server locations. Without access to this database it's impossible for Flagfox to look up IP addresses through DNS requests." This error message only occurs if Convergence is enabled.

[ewanm89]

Considering we truly do not touch DNS in any way, we just MITM HTTPS connections... I keep trying to figure this one out and it comes back to that, it shouldn't affect it.

[sreid99]

For me, it seems https sites are slower when convergence is enabled. Difficult to be 100% sure as obviously many other factors can slow down sites / network, but just done a quick disable/enable of convergence (twice) and https was measurably faster without convergence.

I notice that all https requests go via 127.0.0.1:57046 rather than the sites actual IP. Could this cause a slowdown ? Or slow notaries ? The sites I tried have all been visited before, so the certificates are cached, which should rule out slow notaries.

[moxie0]

Convergence is going to be slower than non-Convergence HTTPS due to the lack of API support from Mozilla. We have to MITM all the traffic locally in JS, which means everything is getting encrypted, shoved through a JS socketpair, decrypted, re-encrypted, and shoved out through JS again. There's really nothing we can do about this until Mozilla get around to providing a certificate validation API (which would be relatively little work for them).

Also, it's true that Convergence is not compatible with FlagFox, since we do "proxy" DNS requests in the sense that Convergence (rather than Firefox proper) does the DNS resolution. It's possible that this interaction with FlagFox is causing a slight slowdown, but I couldn't say for sure.

[sreid99]

Thanks for explaining. Have there been discussions with Mozilla about a certificate validation API ?

[moxie0]

@sreid99 Yes, although they haven't made any movement yet. =(