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Monday, June 8, 2009

Slow Firefox and High Xorg CPU usage in Debian

So, due to some of the latest updates my desktop experience in Linux got considerably damaged. Everything was suddenly much slower and I almost felt for crushing my computer. The solution was close though. I did a google search for "firefox cpu slow debian 2009", and my first hit was my solution. But please read on here..

The root of the problem was obviously a missing line in the xorg.conf file which tells the graphics card what acceleration method to use. Please read M-x Kelsin's solution on this right here.. After you have done this simply go into a shell as root and restart kdm:
/etc/init.d/kdm stop (WARNING!! you will now exit your GUI! So write down the rest, or simply do a restart and you can skip the rest in this section)
now you will get a login prompt. Log in as root and start kdm again:
/etc/init.d/kdm start

Now everything shall be back to normal. BUT I have another tip for you on how to speed up your browsing experience. Install Swiftfox. What is Swiftfox? It's a version of firefox compiled for specifically use in Linux. It has less memory usage and a noticable better performance. Another neat advantage in my opinion is that you always get the latest version. Now for example I am running 3.5b4 in stead of a way older iceweasel(firefox) version which is in the apt libraries for the Debian Testin version. Since the firefox/swiftfox/iceweasel betas are pretty stable anyway, this is just an advantage in my opinion.

Updating is pretty easy, and swiftfox will automaticly use your default bookmarks, plugins and so on which you already have in firefox/iceweasel. To install edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following line:
deb http://getswiftfox.com/builds/debian unstable non-free
Next type:
apt-get update
apt-get install swiftfox-prescott
Notice there is also a i686 version and a athlon64 version available. (apt-cache search swiftfox).

And you are done :) To run swiftfox type: /usr/bin/swiftfox

1 comment:

  1. Good tips. I found some more tips for Firefox crashing problems. Know about it and make your browser run faster.

    ReplyDelete