[CentOS-devel] git.centos.org

[Laurentiu Pancescu]

On 16/12/16 02:35, Phil Wyett wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As default we use CentOS and firefox. Browsing git.centos.org is
> horrible. On machines I have the browser dies until it loads what I see
> as not needed content.

I assume you mean the repositories page, not the front page?  The latter 
loads in 8.89s in Firefox 50.1.0, the stable release (non-ESR), on my 
old Mac mini (featuring a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo from 2009).  It might help 
to disable the ad-blocker or other extensions for *.centos.org, some of 
them really slow things down.

Firefox had pretty inefficient code for rendering tables, and 
git.centos.org/repositories is one giant table.  Back in the Firefox 49 
days, it took almost 4 minutes to render that page on my Mac mini.  A 
Mozillian told me to try Firefox Developer Edition (basically Aurora), 
since there were significant improvements in table layout code around 
version 50-51.  With the current stable release, 50.1.0, that page now 
loads in 55s and the web content process needs 411MB RAM.  Firefox 
Developer Edition, version 52, can do it in 48s (in all cases, new 
profiles with no extensions).  Unfortunately it'll still take a while 
until these improvements land in Firefox ESR, the version packaged in 
CentOS and RHEL.

For comparison: Chrome currently needs 2m39s and 408MB RAM, while Safari 
needs 1m50s and 411MB RAM (although the page appears fully loaded after 
just 28s and you can scroll around - there are just minor height 
adjustments of individual rows after that).

I also tried "curl https://git.centos.org/repositories/ -o /dev/null" 
and noticed the page content is 15MB, but not a single byte arrives in 
the first 20-21 seconds.  Perhaps reverse proxying would help, even set 
to a small value like 10-60 seconds - at least for anonymous users.

Best regards,
Laurențiu