Focus on performance?
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Hey all,
Not sure if this makes sense in this forum, but I wanted to convey to devs and whoever else that may be concerned that the performance of the browser (at least on Windows) could use some significant work.
I originally switched to Vivaldi when it first got released, and switched back to Chrome soon after because it was a bit rough around the edges. Plus, I was kind of convinced that the performance problems that I had been seeing partly stemmed from my machine, which had a respectable CPU (3610QM) but a somewhat limited 8 gigs of RAM.
I've now switched to a Dell XPS with a 8950HK + 32 gigs of RAM and been using Vivaldi again for about a year. And I'm sorry to see that performance problems are still here. Especially with a large number of tabs, everything in the UI slows down considerably: Opening/closing tabs, opening links, etc. It is painful to, e.g., sometimes have to wait for Vivaldi to render a new tab in the the tab bar, and then render the + icon separately soon after that, and so on.
(Plus the down-up gesture to duplicate the page is gone, for some reason? )
I know that Vivaldi has limited resources compared to Google and others (basically financed by Jon von Tetzchner himself directly if my memory serves me right), but I was wondering if it would be possible to take like a few years off from new features, and focus exclusively on performance? I know, what makes Vivaldi Vivaldi is the features, its Opera lineage, and so on and I'm glad that we even have a successor, in 2019, to (the original) Opera, but man, it becomes harder and harder to love using Vivaldi when you see it struggling to update the tab bar when you hit Ctrl-W.
I know this isn't a specific, actionable piece of feedback, but take it to be an anecdotal experience from one of users, if it makes any sense
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Right... so since Vivaldi is blazing fast and super responsive on my PC -which has lower specs than yours- on par or even better than Chrome or Opera, without the white blinding flashes that accompanies those 2 browsers when opening new tabs etc, and tabs performance never degrades for me using even >100 tabs with only 8GB of RAM, I suggest you start searching for what is causing your performance problems instead of generalizing. FYI I don't use any Antivirus so you could start from there, also read https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/20271/third-party-programs-slowing-down-or-blocking-vivaldi Additionaly, the down-up gesture is working fine, maybe you have some extension interfering.
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Thank you for your comment. Sorry I didn't intend to come off as generalizing Vivaldi to be like absolutely unusable or anything, I was just trying to convey my personal experience, which I think should count for something. I haven't run an antivirus in years (except for the builtin Defender which I believe to be as light as it gets). Plus no random background processes, etc (the most notable right now are the various Vivaldi processes, Google Drive and Telegram as far as I see.)
(Also thank you for the heads up on the down-up gesture, didn't think it could be an extension!)
Again, my intention is for Vivaldi to genuinely get better, nothing more
PS: I do currently have around 200 tabs, so maybe it's exacerbating what I'm seeing. But almost all of them are from a cold restart of the browser from an hour ago -- my expectation is that they're lazily loaded so they shouldn't have that much of an impact
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@Xan_ We could do with some objective bench test results to compare Vivaldi to other browsers.
The experience of other users is totally different to yours, but then their workflow is probably totally different too.
I wonder why the devs should focus only on performance when fewer than 15% of users open more than 100 tabs?
I currently have three tabs open in two windows. I rarely open more. I can watch a video on one window while reading or writing in another. There are bookmarks for tabs I might read later, and sessions for groups of tabs that I need to work on a new book project (maybe four or five tabs).
For me, fixing bugs and adding features always wins over performance, because I never notice any problem with performance, and I am sure my PC is a lower spec than yours.
Specs: AMD A10-6800K, 8 Gb on Win 10 64-bit 1903 build 18362.418 • Snapshot 2.9.1719.3 (64-bit)
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I see, it is then probably my usage pattern with a lot of tabs that is the problem. (I haven't kept up with the desktop blog announcements etc so it's nice to see that things are good with a small number of tabs! )
Still, if there's anything that I could do to help to improve the situation for users like me I'd be glad to do so (provide some logs, etc, if applicable)
For reference, here's a clip I just recorded: https://imgur.com/a/TLGoVXg
Edit: The performance visibly improves if I disable extensions, so there's also that. I'll look into keep my active extensions to a minimum
(Edit 2: Off topic, but it looks like the Down-Up gesture started defaulting to "New background tab" at some point. Changed it to "Clone tab" so that's fixed as well)
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Vivaldi may not be the fastest browser of others, although, at least on my PC, also with 8Gb RAM, I do not notice differences in performance with the other browsers I have installed (Edge, Firefox) If there are differences, they do not go beyond milliseconds. All are fluid and fast.
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I was pointing to performance of Vivaldi many times for few years. And I feel, that every update it gets worse and worse despite in Release Notes are mentioning performance improvements. I'm using it at work notebook (Core i5) and home desktop (AMD FX-4100). At first, for speed of UI, doesn't matter if you have 8GB or 32GB ram. New tab and close tab animations are fluid if I have 5 tabs. If I open 6+ tabs, animations starts to struggle. Every click in browser has delay. I really don't understand how one can see blazing fast browser with 100tabs. I really would like to see it on video captured by phone, not by computer. Speed dial start page is horribly slow as on Xan record on both my computers. It gets faster if you remove background image and set only color. Facebook and Youtube after while almost unusable. Youtube pages loads maybe 10 seconds to load completely. Clicks are responding with 1-2 sec delay.
Microsoft Chromium Edge since first release is really smooth and fast. No strugling when scrolling on FB and YT, even, scrolling there looks better then in Vivaldi. UI click reactions are instant, animations are fluid no matter how many tabs I have. Yes, no web tools used in UI...
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@enc0re I'm not sure of specific causes for your issues, but over the years, I've found that reducing/eliminating 'animation' effects in software settings (including the OS) generally makes notable improvements in visual response time and in reducing system loading. This becomes more significant in a graphics-rich environment where a lot of dynamic rendering is necessary to perform smooth animation.
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@Xan_ && @enc0re , it is interesting to hear about your problems and clearly we want to understand what you are seeing and find out why this is happening. I understand that your main issue is with the opening and closing of tabs? Some questions:
- What extensions are you running? Does it help to turn them off?
- Have you tried turning off animations? Does that make a difference for you?
- Have you tried starting fresh, maybe using sync to get your data over and seeing what difference that makes?
- Have you tried emptying the download panel? We have had some issues there before, that have gotten resolved, but you might need to empty it.
Sometimes we find that certain situations makes things a lot slower for some users and finding out what those issues are can help us fix them. If you find out what is generating the problem for you, we can work on fixing it. It may be a simple fix, once we know what your problem is.
Best,
Jon. -
@Blackbird Yes, that might help. But I do not want to remove animations and all effects. Thats why they were created, to have them enabled. Over the years CPU & GPU power has risen up rapidly. So why to disable all fancy effects? I do not agree that software UI is graphic-rich environment, even not in web browser. 3D game running in 4K is graphic-rich, not 2D window.
@jon There are more issues, but lets focus on those two animations.
- I'm running Ublock Origin, Ghostery and LastPass.
- Yes I tried. It doesn't make difference in terms of increasing speed of action. New tab doesn't appear sooner with disabled animations.
- Many times, even without login to sync, just pure default browser, after clean Windows installation when I switched to Samsung Evo SSD.
- Yes, it's empty all the time.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming anybody. I'm testing the browser since first public version and is my primary browser at home & work since the random tab ordering bug was fixed back then. I've made little video (60fps video) how it behaves and utilizing CPU. Look what happens when last tab with page is closed.
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Vivaldi's features are going to save you a lot more time than the milliseconds that get shaved off through performance improvements.
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Possibly there are browsers faster than Vivaldi, but surely none that allows you to work as fast as with this
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@jon thank you so much for your response!
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I'm currently running the following
Google Scholar Button
Session Buddy
Simplify Gmail
Spoiler Protection 2.0
uBlock Origin
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I also had the following activated when I made the original post, which I've since deactivated:
Google Docs Offline
Google Translate
FireShot
View Image
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But overall, turning off extensions does really help, especially if I turn off all of them. -
Turning off animations does help in some cases, closing tabs in particular is better. But I still wouldn't call the overall feel "snappy" -- e.g., there's still a tiny delay between when you release RMB for the Down gesture and when a new tab actually opens (again this may just be a problem in my specific case with a lot of tabs). Speed dial is also generally improved with disabled animations, though occasionally Vivaldi still takes its time rendering it.
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I have not tried moving to a fresh profile. I could try it once I have the time
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I have just emptied the download panel but it doesn't seem to have made a difference as far as I see
@ugly yes I know that's why I'm using it I was just suggesting maybe the features it currently has are competitive-enough as is. (Admittedly I haven't followed the community in a while, so maybe people are asking for lots of new major features, idk)
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@jon said in Focus on performance?:
- Have you tried emptying the download panel? We have had some issues there before, that have gotten resolved, but you might need to empty it.
Clearing my downloads panel has made Vivaldi start up and ready to use in under 3 seconds, instead of 10 to 12 seconds previously
It took around 26 seconds to 'Remove all finished' from the downloads panel - and Vivaldi was completely unresponsive during this process - but it's certainly worth it!
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@paragon said in Focus on performance?:
@jon said in Focus on performance?:
- Have you tried emptying the download panel? We have had some issues there before, that have gotten resolved, but you might need to empty it.
Clearing my downloads panel has made Vivaldi start up and ready to use in under 3 seconds, instead of 10 to 12 seconds previously
It took around 26 seconds to 'Remove all finished' from the downloads panel - and Vivaldi was completely unresponsive during this process - but it's certainly worth it!
Don't forget also the Vivaldi recicle bin's (closed tabs, notes and markers). It is also advisable to empty them from time to time.
(An option to do it automatically when they exceed a certain size, would not be a bad idea) -
There was an issue w/ Downloads list and response time, I am pretty sure. If you look up it should reveal some results. Maybe a regression?
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Just a quick note to say Vivaldi is perfectly acceptable, even on very old hardware, for me. No issues - and one of my systems is an Intel Atom with 2GB RAM.
I'd suggest maybe something you have running in the background is eating up your PC, or you have poorly-written extensions and/or a corrupted Vivaldi profile. Try a blank profile and see if the problem persists. Also check what you have in the background. It could be AV, the quickstarter for your office software/PDF reader, spyware, backup utilities... If you're on a Windows system, the possibilities in this regard are unfortunately endless.
8GB RAM is a lot of RAM. You may not think it, but it is. It's orders of magnitude more than you need for simple web-browsing. I just checked my current running Vivaldi instance, and it occupies just under 5% of that...and it's stacked with extensions (mostly privacy-related ones) like they're ornaments on a Christmas-tree! My Firefox is occuping approximately double that of Vivaldi, but I've got more extensions in it and more tabs are open 5 vs 2. For comparison with your system, if I was on my little Atom netbook, my operating system and both browsers would still fit in its humble 2GB RAM with room to spare. It could be that your sheer number of open tabs is causing problems, but I don't find RAM rises that significantly with numbers of tabs in any browser (i.e. 4 tabs does not double RAM consumption compared to 2). Maybe it's because I just don't open that many tabs. I think the most I've ever got to is about 25, but usually it's 1 or 2, very rarely I'll increase it to 3-5.
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@Xan_
Hi, is it may possible Vivaldi is running on your integrated Intel graphic card and not on your discrete Nvidia?
This is mainly setup for power saving.Cheers, mib
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This problem is not Windows-specific: I experience pretty much the same on my Linux machine and this (plus M2) still prevents me from fully leaving presto.
Vivaldi is just so much more sluggish than presto (and it does not even cache the page contents), and it is also more sluggish than chromium or chrome (cannot compare it to FF). 50+ tabs do not help with this. I think that it is bearable with mediocre modern hardware, but on my old hardware (i5 from 2012 with 8GB RAM) I just cannot use it.
Although there certainly is space for improvement, I see the fundamental problem in webkit / the bad JS engine and the extensive usage of JS instead of a native UI and not in vivaldi.
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@Gwen-Dragon said in Focus on performance?:
Send all other tabs except the current to state "Hibernate background Tabs" by context menu, that saves RAM and CPU.
When I do this and I only have 2 active tabs after reloading, it still needs ~0.5 seconds to switch between them when using my shortcuts. Presto needs half this time at most, with 100+ tabs open. To test, just activate single key shortcuts, load 10 sites in both browsers and then type "1" multiple times in order to get to a specific tab. In presto, I am easily capable of doing this because the current page is updated basically instantly. In vivaldi, this is hard to do, since there is a lot of delay - and even more when a page is not pre-loaded.
And yes, maybe this also is due to some extensions (although I only use a handful); but when I need them to get somewhat feature-parity with presto, I think this is only a fair comparison.
On my current hardware, I am at the moment finally using vivaldi as my primary browser, but responsiveness is still some major criticism that I have.
And as I mentioned: chromium/chrome is not really much better and never was an option for me, either. So because vivaldi builds upon chromium, it is clear that this is not primarily fault or duty of vivaldi.