(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Quite apart from the general slowing-down of t’internet in recent days due to heavy use by those in virus ‘lockdown’, I seem to be suffering serious slowing down of my own regular box since downloading the latest PM version about a week ago, even when I have killed my internet connection.

Today I was very surprised to see, via Topview, 115 processes continuing to run - most of which were completely unfamiliar! - after I had shut down PM altogether.

(Background: I’m currently running Dpup Stretch 7.5 frugal on a PentiumD box - nominal max 3800 MHz, 2006 BIOS, with 3026MB RAM + 255 MB swap. I reluctantly switched over from an earlier box running my favourite Puppy 4.3.1 with original Seamonkey 1.1.18 about a year ago, when the latter had begun to fail to access so many bloated websites. Although I added Ublock Origin with fairly tight restrictions at that time, I’ve also been quite peeved to note a huge increase in consumption on my data usage account since then ... but maybe that’s a subject for a different thread).

I’ve also been dismayed to see reams of apparently redundant, but persistent, small files being created in peculiar places within my filing system, since starting to use PM.

So, wot’s goin’ on with PM? I’m very keen to hear about others’ experiences - and especially, any fixes.

Hi dogle.

I haven't used PaleMoon in a while, so I won't answer that part of your question.
I'm sure one of our "PaleMoon experts" will show up shortly!

But I see that you have only 255 MB of swap space: that's not enough.

Recommended is at least 500 MB, ideally 2.5 times your amount of RAM.

So my suggestion would be to create a swap partition of approx. 8 GB on a hard
drive that's not too populated. It's easy to do using the gparted utility.

Although surprising on the face of it, since you have 3 GB of RAM, some websites
are terribly image- and video-rich nowadays, and they gobble up resources on your
box like crazy. Anything too big for the RAM is absorbed by the swap -- unfortunately
the swap is much slower than RAM, but it saves your box from crashing.

As to your system running +/- 115 processes with no PM running, I'd say that's normal.
On my box, I see 42 processes running in htop, and I've set it up so as not to show all.
Linuxes need a minimum of processes to run, you know!

IHTH

Not an expert but with one window open (this one), the home tab and nothing else, Pale Moon's showing about 447 MB in Conky and 183 processes running, which isn't too bad for 2020.

With 3 GB of Ram though you should be able to run it OK; that's what my old machine had. Pale Moon has an *add-on which puts any inactive tabs to sleep so that they don't continue to use resources when you're not actually loading them; I'll see if I can find it.

I agree with musher that you need more swap though. Ideally you should have at least as big a swap partition as you have RAM; I have less because I have nearly 6 GB of RAM and don't need much of it.

[*Found it; it's called Lull The Tabs.]

https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/lull-the-tabs/

I run Palemoon on my ScPup 32 bit frugal installs on this little Acer Aspire
One AO150 netbook, 1.6 gHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1 gig RAM, 120 gig HD,
with all puppies I use only a 512 meg swap file. So far, haven't noticed a
slowdown with Palemoon. FWIW---I also use a "community developer
release" of Palemoon called New Moon for Windows XP, which I also use
on this netbook.
Perhaps it is your choice of Puppy which is causing the slowdown???
I tend to gravitate towards Slackware and it's offsprings, which is why I
prefer ScPup, current favorite is ScPup 20.01 with LXQt desktop.
Wiz

What add-ons you got installed and using?
Extensions?
Plugins?

dogle wrote:Today I was very surprised to see, via Topview, 115 processes continuing to run - most of which were completely unfamiliar! - after I had shut down PM altogether.

(currently running Dpup Stretch 7.5 frugal on a PentiumD box 3800 MHz with 3026MB RAM + 255 MB swap.

Palemoon has its moments. Some versions work ok and others are a headache. I'm sticking to 28.8.2 because it works pretty well on my system (DPupBuster 8, 64bit /Athlon II X2 250 Processor + 8 GB ram and NO swap. I found swap had no use in my system, so I ditched it) and shows me YT the way I like it (no polymer).

At this very moment, Palemoon (with 27 tabs opened) is using 588MB of ram (perhaps nMatrix addon has something to do with that).

All in all, a total of 30 processes running (PM included) using only 1413MB / 8GB of ram.

Just FYI, here is a list of the addons I use:

Context Search X
Google Translator for Pale Moon
I don't care about cookies
Mouse Gestures Suite
nextpage
ScriptBlock
Toolbarize Menu Button
uBlock Origin
ηMatrix

Hope you find a solution to your problem!

Thanks everyone for your very helpful observations, and for a personal message warning me of a sudden splurge in PM bugfix revisions.

For the record, I'm running PM 28.9.0 with no plugins, just extensions 'active stop button' and UBlock Origin 1.16.4.10 set to 'block media elements >10kB'.

(I see the latest PM version is now at 28.9.0.2).

I do agree that my legacy swap partition is stupidly small by today's standards and that's something I'll be addressing shortly, although right now I rather doubt that that has been the root of my problems ('cos it doesn't seem to see much use).

Thus far the emerging consensus seems to be that this slow performance is not a PM problem at all, but more likely a consequence of all the unnecessary garbage which dimwitted and uncleanly website skiddies are now seeking to fling in our direction.

So, if there are no contrarian views expressed over the next day or so I'll mark this thread accordingly, and seek to address the problem of garbage-suppression in a new one.

PS - since my OP I've been developing a dark suspicion that a (more than usually) buggy - or corrupted - version of AbiWord (3.0.1) might be at least part of the problem. I often leave it running, and it has been prone to lots of misbehaviour - any comments on that one most welcome.

I have releaved in recent days of covid19 that when the network is overcharged palemoon (my main browser) is unable to stream videos while firefox can. I think this depends on my provider and sites filtering the network requests.

EDIT: further testing: starting palemoon with a new profile solves the problem of streaming videos when it is not possible sometimes with the main profile. Have I a corrupted profile or is it a filtering issue? I'm surfing now with a new profile and I'll report any issue.

Using palemoon I have had again problem streaming youtube with the new profile after 4-5 hours of use and when the network is overcharged (late-evening). Restarting palemoon solves the problem. When you close palemoon you have to wait 1-2 minutes before starting it again because of hidden processes. The latest palemoon has issues.

I believe you should still be able to force the previous YouTube UI by adding ?disable_polymer=1 to the end of each URL (you'll have to do it manually, though, because I think it 'goes away' if you click on a link to any other video/YT page). Even better, if you can find an extension or userscript to automatically add it to every YouTube URL.

I'm not sure if it still works, because I haven't tried watching any YouTube videos in a while.

I have googled and come at the conclusion that it's a user-agent issue. I have installed from ca-archive the User Agent Switcher extension and I have loaded a list of user agents choosing Firefox 55.0 64 bit user agent. The problem seems solved. I'll report any issue.

Can the user control the size of the cache in PaleMoon?

A larger cache means less download of material from
often visited sites, IOW more speed.

Just a thought.

I have set palemoon to delete the cache when I close it. The problem is solved changing the user agent: now palemoon has an its own default user agent which is an issue. Using firefox as user agent the problem is solved: this evening I haven't experienced any problem streaming videos.

Salute, watchdog.

I couldn't comment on YouTube problem because I don't download any video material - at least not intentionally - but I and others have also had PM useragent issues. ( I was caught unawares by the developers' intentional useragent twiddling going back to 2016, my thanks to anikin for drawing attention to Moonchild's sharp remarks back then, in the main PM thread here ) -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... &start=245

Yes, musher0, that is a user option, good thought.

My PM has been behaving quite well just recently, so it seems that the slowdown which I experienced after version change was purely coincidental and I'll just have to sniff elsewhere for the cause of it.

I have to reopen my issue on videos streaming sometimes not working. Changing user agent does not completely solve the problem. Restarting palemoon I have captured some error code of hanging processes:
I have googled and there are several bug reports about crashing MediaShutdownManager not solved at Mozilla. It could be a sound issue.

When video streaming not working and many tabs open, I now open another instance of palemoon with different profile and this works.

In view of watchdog's remarks re. user agent issues, perhaps I should mention that Moonchild &co have again been busy, and as of today Palemoon (PM) is now at version 28.9.2 following several minor revisions some of which have included user agent fixing tweaks.

Before sewing up this thread, I'd like to pose a supplementary question:
- since switching to Dpup Stretch with PM a year or so ago I've been dismayed to see lots of apparently redundant files cluttering my system.
F'rinstance, 12K files of the form ~/.event-sound-cache.tdb.[hashcode].i586-pc-linux-gnu, (I don't intentionally download any audio), and hundreds of 0B files of the form /tmp.gsf-save-xxxxx where xxxxxx is something like 0FMO10.

These files are persistent, in that they are not removed by clearing the PM cache, but searching the PM forum for these formats has given me nil results so I don't know whether this is a PM glitch - or perhaps one in Dpup Stretch? - any enlightenment would be very welcome.

(I'm sorry to see that Dpup Stretch developer has been silent here since November - hey, radky, if you're out there, I do hope you are OK).