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Mozilla

Startup Time in the Wild Take Three

Over a week ago, I collected the data I said I was going to look at last time. I finally had a chance to look at the data (startup times with and without add-ons for two profiles on the latest version of 3.6), and my hypothesis was not verified. That means it is back to the drawing board for me. The graphs are not at all interesting, so I am not going to post them. At this point, I think the goal is officially at risk. With the profiles we got, I am not even seeing slow startups with cold startup. It is hard to diagnose a problem you cannot reproduce, sadly.

Next Step

Next week I am going to sync up with limi and get some contact information from the people that sent these profiles to us. We are going to have to do some remote debugging to see why they see such slow startup times.

News on the Past

Paul is feverishly working on a solution to make session restore not kill us on startup. He even has some test builds which you can download and test, but these are experimental. You should make a copy of your profile as a backup when using this test build in case things go boom.

By Shawn Wilsher

The man behind the site.

4 replies on “Startup Time in the Wild Take Three”

Well I just wanted to congratulate you on going to such lengths to deliver a quality product.
Most of the time, not-reproducible problems tend to simply be ignored.

Kudos!

Wow you really like a challenge don’t you!

So if its not replicable what could be the cause?…

Malware
Viruses
AV
MS Patches
Lack of MS patches
Drivers
Other conflicting Installed apps.
Memory Errors.
HD Errors.
Hardware problems.
User Error.

Any combination of the above…

Good luck with that :-(

___

On a more constructive note:

1. Biggest startup issue I had was related to the number of RSS Live Book Marks I had.

That has been fixed, by some work on staggering their loading, as did vacuuming the db (and me deleting a lot that were not in use).

2. Number of tabs was next issue – BarTab fixed that :-)

I will be very interested in how bit a problem this is… what are the hard numbers?

Slowdown…The cause: Unknown

Most people I encounter with slow start-ups of Firefox mostly comment about it on forums just to promote other browsers. When I ask questions just to help them out, they become shady and ignore. Other people who claim to have slow start-ups may not have their computers optimized or truly understand that most problems are user-related. It is somewhat hard to figure this out if some users do not understand their problem. Anyways I keep my Dell Studio1535 Laptop optimized as with my other 3 computers in my household. Firefox(updated) on all computers including an old 2001 HP Pavilion desktop(XP) start-up Firefox in an average of 2.5 seconds or faster. While monitoring, the only slow-down on my oldest computer is the Hard drive.

I normally keep around 400 bookmarks(so many interesting pages, so little time), 12 plug-ins and 8 extensions. Other than that, the Firefox Beta is running great. No problems with the beta except small hiccups with high memory usage, and low contrast with the font letters.

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