Is amd64 firefox faster?

katabami · n00b Joined: 11 Jul 2009 Posts: 40

Hi. I've got amd64. I tried firefox for x86-64 from fedora. It seems to run faster than gentoo's firefox-bin. Is it so, or it's only I felt so?
(I'm a layman who don't understand multilib. For fedora's case, you need libstartup package, too.)

I don't know how to check the latest rpm from fedora. (At this moment, the latest ff is 3.5.5, but the fedora's latest seems to be 3.5.3, judging by browsing google result.) Does anyone have any recommendation for particula distros?

Regards.

cach0rr0 · Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2009 7:18 am Post subject:

easiest way to tell - run a benchmark of both

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StringCheesian · l33t Joined: 21 Oct 2003 Posts: 887

You can see the compiler version and flags Mozilla and Fedora used by visiting "about:buildconfig".

If you're running stable Gentoo, your video driver, xorg, and gtk libs might be older than Fedora's. Not using the same filesystem and kernel version as Fedora could also matter. Phoronix benchmarks have shown that sqlite performance is surprisingly sensitive to kernel changes.

64 bit Firefox 3.5.x actually has a disadvantage for javascript:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489146

This is fixed in trunk (3.7). I wish I knew about 3.6.x.

katabami · n00b Joined: 11 Jul 2009 Posts: 40

Hi, all. Thanks for your reply.
The benchmark score is, to my surprise, that gentoo portage is 479 and fedora is 392, so Gentoo is considerably better.

I don't know what affected. Here's my way to try Fedora's:
* Get rpm
* use rpm2tar
* tar -xf
* cd usr/lib64/firefox; ./firefox

I don't understand build config, but let me paste them:
Gentoo:
target: i686-pc-linux-gnu
gcc flags: -Wall -W -Wno-unused -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align -W -Wno-long-long -pedantic -gstabs+ -fno-strict-aliasing -pthread -pipe -DNDEBUG -DTRIMMED -Os -freorder-blocks -fno-reorder-functions -finline-limit=50
g++ flags -fno-rtti -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Woverloaded-virtual -Wsynth -Wno-ctor-dtor-privacy -Wno-non-virtual-dtor -Wcast-align -Wno-invalid-offsetof -Wno-long-long -pedantic -gstabs+ -fno-strict-aliasing -fshort-wchar -pthread -pipe -DNDEBUG -DTRIMMED -Os -freorder-blocks -fno-reorder-functions -finline-limit=50
configure: --enable-application=browser --enable-optimize --enable-update-channel=release --enable-update-packaging --disable-debug --disable-tests --enable-official-branding

fedora:
target: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
gcc flags: -Wall -W -Wno-unused -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align -W -Wno-long-long -pedantic -O2 -g -pipe -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -m64 -mtune=generic -fno-strict-aliasing -pthread -pipe -DNDEBUG -DTRIMMED -Os -freorder-blocks -fno-reorder-functions
c++ flags: -fno-rtti -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Woverloaded-virtual -Wsynth -Wno-ctor-dtor-privacy -Wno-non-virtual-dtor -Wcast-align -Wno-invalid-offsetof -Wno-long-long -pedantic -O2 -g -pipe -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -m64 -mtune=generic -fno-strict-aliasing -fshort-wchar -pthread -pipe -DNDEBUG -DTRIMMED -Os -freorder-blocks -fno-reorder-functions
Configure: --enable-application=browser --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64 --enable-system-lcms --enable-system-cairo --with-system-jpeg --with-system-zlib --with-system-bz2 --with-pthreads --disable-strip --disable-tests --disable-mochitest --disable-installer --disable-debug --enable-optimize --enable-xinerama --enable-default-toolkit=cairo-gtk2 --disable-xprint --disable-strip --enable-pango --enable-svg --enable-canvas --enable-startup-notification --disable-javaxpcom --disable-crashreporter --enable-safe-browsing --enable-official-branding

sera · Retired Dev Joined: 29 Feb 2008 Posts: 1017 Location: CET

I've run the test out of curiosity, especially the animation in space was nice to watch and ran without hiccups.

Score 987 with firefox-3.5.4 on a 5 year old amd64 machine. Sounds reasonable.

However if you have a problem with speed in firefox add noscript and maybe adblock to your browser. Sites should load almost instantaneous then. Noscript can be installed by enabling firefoxes java-script useflag.

However the test results heavily depend on the machine it was run on. I also suspect the video drivers to have an impact. For complex graphics I scored 2814:), whatever that means.