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Which firefox do you use?
Regular www-client/firefox - this is the normal Gentoo way even with a slow box
70%
 70%  [ 47 ]
www-client/firefox-bin - my machine is too slow to build
5%
 5%  [ 4 ]
www-client/firefox-bin - don't have enough sacrificial disk space (SSD or 0 bytes free)
0%
 0%  [ 0 ]
www-client/firefox-bin - this is the "legal" binary Mozilla.org builds.
5%
 5%  [ 4 ]
I have them both installed...
4%
 4%  [ 3 ]
I don't use firefox at all.
13%
 13%  [ 9 ]
Total Votes : 67

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dmpogo
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 1:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ant P. wrote:
Tony0945 wrote:
Ant P., why spend two hours building something no better than the binary?

firefox-bin has a hard dep on gtk3, firefox doesn't


?? how come ? I have firefox-bin on all my machines, but not gtk3 on any o them.
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eccerr0r
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 1:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

From what I remember, ever since around the firefox 7 timeframe, link was the worst part of building firefox. And if that machine has less than around 1GB RAM, link will take forever as it swaps things in and out... or are most people using ld.gold or something nowadays to speed up linking?

I no longer use machines with less than 1GB RAM, so with a bit of swap, linking doesn't kill the machine that much. I do recall trying to build on a 1.2GHz P3-Celeron with 384MB RAM and setting up an ungodly amount of swap (around 1.25GB - around 4:1 swap to real ram ratio) for it to complete, and it took at least around an hour to finish that one link step. I forget how long it took to link exactly, but was clearly disk limited. I don't know if things would have been any better with zswap or not.
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Ant P.
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 7:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

dmpogo wrote:
Ant P. wrote:
Tony0945 wrote:
Ant P., why spend two hours building something no better than the binary?

firefox-bin has a hard dep on gtk3, firefox doesn't


?? how come ? I have firefox-bin on all my machines, but not gtk3 on any o them.

You're probably using stable, not ~arch.
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tld
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 4:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm using an old x86 machine and stopped compiling a few years ago because it just tanked my machine. However then I had very little RAM and now I at least have 2 GB.

I'm wondering if I should try again. Does FF even compile on 32 bit x86? Their published compile requirements are really vague on that, saying it won't build on "most" 32 bit systems.

Tom
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eccerr0r
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 5:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

My single core atom 1.6GHz was able to build 32-bit, and I would think Gentoo does regress test x86 still... I hope... though I think amd64 is now mainline. If you have 1.5GB RAM (whether it be real or swap) it's worth a shot.

I have a 4-core atom 1.83GHz 32/64 bit that I've not tried building on, mainly because it only has 1GB RAM and didn't work well with Linux, last I tried. I suspect that it may run out of ram with -j5 and need to swap...
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Ant P.
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 9:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

tld wrote:
Does FF even compile on 32 bit x86?

Some numbers to answer that question:
Code:
~ # free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           2.0G         55M        1.8G         26M        137M        1.7G
Swap:          2.7G          0B        2.7G

Code:
~ # lscpu
Architecture:          i686
CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit
Byte Order:            Little Endian
CPU(s):                2
On-line CPU(s) list:   0,1
Thread(s) per core:    2
Core(s) per socket:    1
Socket(s):             1
Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel
CPU family:            6
Model:                 28
Model name:            Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270   @ 1.60GHz
Stepping:              2
CPU MHz:               800.000
CPU max MHz:           1600.0000
CPU min MHz:           800.0000
BogoMIPS:              3191.96
L1d cache:             24K
L1i cache:             32K
L2 cache:              512K
Flags:                 fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf eagerfpu pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 xtpr pdcm movbe lahf_lm dtherm

Code:
~ # qlop -gHv chromium firefox
chromium-54.0.2840.34: Wed Sep 28 00:11:59 2016: 1 hour, 35 minutes, 58 seconds
chromium-54.0.2840.34: Sun Oct  9 03:13:50 2016: 8 hours, 3 minutes, 8 seconds
chromium-54.0.2840.59: Wed Oct 19 23:50:21 2016: 9 hours, 1 minute, 47 seconds
chromium-55.0.2883.21: Fri Oct 28 17:58:35 2016: 8 hours, 36 minutes, 4 seconds
chromium-55.0.2883.35: Sun Nov 13 23:57:40 2016: 12 hours, 37 minutes, 28 seconds
chromium-55.0.2883.75: Fri Dec  9 01:29:18 2016: 10 hours, 3 minutes, 43 seconds
chromium-56.0.2924.21: Tue Dec 20 18:06:08 2016: 7 hours, 28 minutes, 2 seconds
chromium: 7 times
firefox-37.0.1: Sun Apr 12 21:11:32 2015: 1 hour, 33 minutes, 44 seconds
firefox-37.0.2: Wed May  6 06:54:27 2015: 1 hour, 27 minutes, 2 seconds
firefox-37.0.2: Wed May 20 06:23:03 2015: 1 hour, 32 minutes, 3 seconds
firefox-38.0.1: Fri Jun  5 22:50:20 2015: 1 hour, 39 minutes, 53 seconds
firefox-38.0.5: Thu Jun 25 08:48:03 2015: 1 hour, 43 minutes, 23 seconds
firefox-39.0: Thu Jul 16 23:51:11 2015: 1 hour, 40 minutes, 3 seconds
firefox-39.0.3: Tue Aug 11 00:20:57 2015: 1 hour, 41 minutes, 57 seconds
firefox-38.3.0: Sun Oct  4 20:36:12 2015: 1 hour, 18 minutes, 23 seconds
firefox-38.4.0: Mon Nov  9 18:13:12 2015: 1 hour, 11 minutes, 18 seconds
firefox-38.4.0: Sun Nov 15 20:15:28 2015: 1 hour, 6 minutes, 58 seconds
firefox-51.0: Sat Feb  4 21:22:46 2017: 1 hour, 28 minutes, 38 seconds
firefox: 11 times

Times are with distcc (seems pretty useless for chromium), but it has to survive the linker step on its own. It had 1GB RAM until a few months ago.
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dmpogo
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 10:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ant P. wrote:
dmpogo wrote:
Ant P. wrote:
Tony0945 wrote:
Ant P., why spend two hours building something no better than the binary?

firefox-bin has a hard dep on gtk3, firefox doesn't


?? how come ? I have firefox-bin on all my machines, but not gtk3 on any o them.

You're probably using stable, not ~arch.


That's it
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tld
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 10:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ant P. wrote:
tld wrote:
Does FF even compile on 32 bit x86?

Some numbers to answer that question
Thanks! Given that I'm definitely giving it a try soon.
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tld
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 3:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow, wow, wow. I actually was able to compile FF 45.7 on my dinosaur x86 system. It took a long time...almost 6 hours...although I was using the system the whole time and it was never abnormally taxed in any way.

But wow...was it ever worth it. I've always found that the x86 firefox-bin was really buggy for me. I had things that rendered improperly that I could reproduce on other systems with the exact same FF version...iced-web (which I need to use webex) with newer versions of icedtea-bin crashed, etc etc...all of which appear fine with the compiled version. However I didn't realize the degree to which firefox-bin was a total dog for me. The difference in speed/response is an order of magnitude, and that's the case for every aspect of using the browser. When using FF now it's like I have a new computer. For a long time I thought it was just that FF was getting bloated over time, but 99% of it was that binary version.

Is it possible that the x86 firefox-bin is compiled to handle p3 etc? I really am blown away by the difference I'm seeing.
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eccerr0r
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 5:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Maybe I wasn't actually seeing things? I thought it felt the self compiled on my atom really is faster, but I hope this isn't just confirmational bias... really need benchmarks to know for sure :)
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tld
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 4:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I definitely don't need benchmarks...firefox-bin was literally like trying to run through quicksand compared to what I have now...and there are many other things aside from just response time. For example, the HTML5 player on youtube was totally unusable, but works flawlessly in this version. Totally night and day in my case.
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eccerr0r
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 4:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I guess it settles it, it is worth it to recompile Firefox!
Just need to make sure one has 4GB disk space...
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Tony0945
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 5:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

eccerr0r wrote:
I guess it settles it, it is worth it to recompile Firefox!
Just need to make sure one has 4GB disk space...


I'll yield on Atom, x86 and, although no one has mentioned it, arm. But I stick with "no difference" on amd64 with a recent processor.
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eccerr0r
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 1:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

But I have an ancient AMD64 CPU (old Athlon64 3000+ I think) to try it on :)
Then again, blah, don't really want to... I don't use that machine...
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Tony0945
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 2:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

eccerr0r wrote:
But I have an ancient AMD64 CPU (old Athlon64 3000+ I think) to try it on :)

That machine probably has limited memory and it might be worthwhile.

I have one of those too that I converted to win7 so I can do my taxes. I access it from Linux via rdesktop and the display is really good!

The Linux disk was cloned onto an SSD for my new Kaveri server.
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eccerr0r
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 2:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's just the instruction throughput of this machine that's the problem. I have 1.25GB RAM on the machine at the moment, so it can take some link abuse (distcc to my other amd64 boxes). But definitely as-is with a generic i686 firefox binary as well as the flash binary (eiew) it's painfully slow, haven't seen any videos it can play back at all. This is a test on a i686 Gentoo USB flash stick, so it's not optimized for any architecture. Perhaps having 64-bit and a tuned for athlon64 might show a significant speed bump.

I would have thought the A64 with nouveau should be all around faster than my Atom with chipset graphics at 32 bit though, even with unoptimized binaries on both machines. Not sure why it's so slow at firefox.
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sheepduke
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 3:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I compile firefox on my PC without flag and using binary package from my laptop.

I found it really handy because if you disable -march flags, the performance is still good and you gain the ability to serve your PC as a portage server for other slow boxes...

To be honest, your options does not really cover my case...It should be "I compile firefox in a powerful machine, and transfer the binary to a slow box" ;-)

P.S. I think it is acceptable to compile firefox with an i5 quad core 3.4GHz machine. libreoffice is really a nightmare to compile... 8O
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eccerr0r
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 4:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just choose that you compile just like as Gentoo is designed as, I think that actually does fit your usage :p

However still wonder why the custom built binaries work so much better than firefox-bin. Then again the generic built firefox as said on the previous post seems just as slow as firefox-bin. However it's just the wet finger benchmark...
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fb0x
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2017 10:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have switched to firefox-bin after rust is firefox dependency. It takes two times longer to compiler rust than firefox and it's not possible to build firefox with rust-bin.
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Ant P.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2017 10:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Since my last post with timing numbers, chromium's gone from 12 hours to 26 on that Atom. It doesn't feel like there's anything close to a corresponding doubling of utility in the software...

I'm starting to think about switching browsers again (it's always build issues that force my hand…) except last time I checked, rust took 18 hours on its own. I haven't been able to build it at all for months because its dependency tree makes no effort to be compatible with libressl; for all I know it could be even worse now.
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tld
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2017 12:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ant P. wrote:
I'm starting to think about switching browsers again (it's always build issues that force my hand…) except last time I checked, rust took 18 hours on its own. I haven't been able to build it at all for months because its dependency tree makes no effort to be compatible with libressl; for all I know it could be even worse now.
On my archaic x86 machine I've been running palemoon 27.4.1 out of here:
Code:
layman -l

 * palemoon                  [Git       ] (https://github.com/deuiore/palemoon-overlay.git
I've been really happy with that actually, and even on this machine and gcc 5.4 it compiled in around 6 hours I believe. Note that I had to move my portage tmp as that build seems to overstate the required space quite a bit. I also needed the environment variable PALEMOON_ENABLE_UNSUPPORTED_COMPILERS=1. Been great though.

Tom
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HungGarTiger
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2017 2:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ant P. wrote:
Since my last post with timing numbers, chromium's gone from 12 hours to 26 on that Atom. It doesn't feel like there's anything close to a corresponding doubling of utility in the software...

I'm starting to think about switching browsers again (it's always build issues that force my hand…) except last time I checked, rust took 18 hours on its own. I haven't been able to build it at all for months because its dependency tree makes no effort to be compatible with libressl; for all I know it could be even worse now.


I've been using dillo on my coding computer as it's a little dual core Atom and I'm scared of the compiling time and loss of performance, it was a dog when it ran Windows 10 and FF but it did it. Now I am curious what browsers are semi feature rich and balance wth performance, dillo works as a coding guide when I am just messing around though
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Perfect Gentleman
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2017 3:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I compile it as I use modified ebuild aimed for security and privacy.
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Hu
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2017 4:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Perfect Gentleman: could you elaborate on what this ebuild changes and share where it is maintained?
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Ant P.
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2017 6:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

HungGarTiger wrote:
Now I am curious what browsers are semi feature rich and balance wth performance, dillo works as a coding guide when I am just messing around though

Netsurf is somewhere between Dillo and a mainstream browser. It's a bit broken on i686 but it works. Feels a lot like Firefox 1.0.
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