Very slow behavior with SunBlade 2500 and Firefox 10 ESR

[wvalcke]

I was trying to run browservice on a Linux mint machine via the following command: ./browservice-v0.9.5.1-x86_64.AppImage --vice-opt-http-listen-addr=0.0.0.0:8080 Then using the Firefox 10 on the ultrasparc Sun machine , it connects to the service but opening web pages is actually extremely slow which makes this impossible to use. Although some videos on the internet show old computers surfing the web at an acceptable speed. The Sun machine is definitely a lot faster than old pc's running Windows 95, so what is the problem?

[ttalvitie]

There are a few possible causes for slowness:

1. The Linux machine being too slow (it should be a modern machine, fast enough to run a Chromium browser).
2. The connection between the Linux machine and the Sun machine being too slow (it should be a fast and low-latency connection; the network cards at both ends and everything between them should be able to do close to 100 Mbit/s, or at the very least 10 Mbit/s).
3. The Sun machine being too slow (but as you said, the specs seem faster than many PCs that are able to run Browservice tolerably).
4. The SPARC version of Firefox 10 is inefficient (i.e. the code that handles showing PNG/JPEG images, which is what Browservice mostly does on the client side, is too slow on the SPARC version of Firefox for some reason).

To address the issue, it would be good to identify which ones of these are actually the causes for the slowness. There are some diagnostics you could do:

• Run a local browser on the Linux machine and connect to Browservice instance running on localhost. This should prove or disprove cause 1.
• Run a HTTP server on the Linux machine and serve a large file through it; download it on the Sun machine. Measure the download speed. This should directly measure the speed bottleneck in cause 2.
• Instead of the Sun machine, connect a modern machine to the same local network and try accessing Browservice through it. This should help narrow down the possibilities of where the actual bottleneck is in cause 2.
• Use another client browser on the Sun machine. If it's a lot faster, then it's probably cause 4.

One thing you should also try if you didn't already is to switch from PNG (the default) to JPEG and use a lower quality; this makes the files smaller and the compression faster and thus may help with all the causes. You can do this easily with the vice-opt-default-quality command line option, for example --vice-opt-default-quality=30.