Hi Nolan

Thanks for sharing your Firefox related performance problems

I use it frequently and have observed similar problems in recent weeks
I usually use nightly and I often have many windows and many tabs in each
window open
I also use a script locker
My computer may be a little older than yours but very similar hardware
configuration
Sometimes we starting Firefox helps and sometimes we starting nvda helps
Sometimes I will come back to the machine in the morning after not using it
overnight but leaving things up just locking my screen and it will be
almost unusable

Thanks for the tip on using brave maybe I'll give that a try at some point

Just wanted to chime in and let you know I've had similar observations with
things pointing in similar directions to your conclusions

using the task manager I haven't been able to pinpoint anything other than
Firefox using lots of resources

I haven't done any deep dive into logs

Russ

On Sat, Feb 13, 2021, 9:14 AM Nolan Darilek <nolan@thewordnerd.info> wrote:

I'm a bit hesitant to wade into this, but I too am a bit suspicious by
the
jump directly to HD issues.

Long shot, but you're not running Firefox or Thunderbird by chance, are
you?

I've been having some odd, regular slowdowns recently. My PC is fairly
high-power--I7, 8 cores, 32 GB of RAM, a few years old but not
under-powered. Windows installation is only a few months old, but
previously it ran Linux and barely broke a sweat. Under Windows, I got
about a day or two of use before I often had to hard powercycle the
machine. Task Manager didn't give me much that was reliable. Antimalware
Service was often high on the performance list, but not reliably. I
couldn't trace it to a specific action or change--my CPU fan would
eventually go crazy, and my entire system would slowly go unresponsive.

Eventually I tracked it to Firefox. Killing Firefox always replaced the
need for a reboot. Tried debugging Firefox further--disabling some
extensions, using Nightly, etc. Nothing reliably fixed it. I'm also
using a few layers of ad blocking, and while the blocking itself may
have slowed things down a bit, I imagine the code that was blocked and
didn't run probably cancelled out the extra effort the blockers made
filtering it out. So it likely wasn't any page in particular, and none
reliably caused this behavior either.

Now I'm running Brave, and the problems are mostly gone. I do, however,
experience slowdowns when working in Thunderbird, particularly when
opening a message. Yes, I've seen the Thunderbird speedup tips recently,
but I don't feel like those helped, particularly since things worked
fine under Linux.

Starting to wonder if there's some Gecko NVDA regression, or maybe a
Gecko regression with the underlying a11y APIs. Haven't tried diagnosing
it further, but as a developer that's kind of what this feels like.
Wondering if you might be hitting this too. Are you running FF, and if
so, does killing it get your performance back? I guess this could be
non-a11y-related, or maybe an issue with crappy drivers, but if this
regression were more mainstream then I can't imagine it wouldn't be high
priority and fixed. That's why I suspect something in the a11y stack.