Firefox v51.01 slows down gradually and freezes with a custom GStreamer plugin and when switching between screens that play 4 live video streams at 30 fps.
I'm using Firefox v51.0.1 on Ubuntu with 16Gb RAM and 4 cores. I have to use a custom built GStreamer based video decoder plugin and that is why I'm using v51. There are two screens each playing 4 streams each. The videos play at 30fps without any problem once displayed on browser. There is a switch button which can switch between 2 sets of 4 streams each (quad view). When the pages are switched, say for about 100-200 times, the responsiveness of the browser slows down gradually and at one point, it just stops to respond to any further clicks. When Firefox froze, CPU utilization is about 30%, RAM about 25%. I tried to modify about:config parameters, but could not figure out which are the most relevant to my use case and the optimum values to be set.
I request community's help to identify the parameter combinations in v51.0.1 that could potentially keep Firefox from slowing down. In case more information is required, I will be glad to give them, but please suggest on how to get them out of the browser.
Thank you for taking your time on this subject!
All Replies (6)
To be perfectly honest, Firefox 51 is no longer supported. The current version of Firefox is 70. There are dramatic differences between these versions, and 70 is worlds faster than 51.
You shouldn't be using such an old version
Thanks for your response. Your suggestion would be ideal, but since the custom build plugin must be used, I'm just stuck with v51. And I believe there are a lot of configuration parameters that are shared between the newest version and v51. If you know of some interesting ones that you think impact my use case, please let me know.
GStreamer support has been removed in Firefox 46 (bug 1234092) and replaced by the HTML5 media player, so are you sure that Firefox actually uses this GStreamer plugin ?
Plugin support (except flash) has been removed since Firefox 52, although on 52 you can enable it through an about:config parameter. I'm using a custom plugin on 51 which works.
Linux distributions coming up from now on do likely support GStreamer 1.0 only. The implementation might need to be updated in Gecko.
Given that the Firefox process already maps gstreamer libraries (through libcanberra) it's not really an option to have 0.10 in parallel to 1.0 as there are symbol clashes between both AFAIK.
Porting information: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer/tree/docs/random/porting-to-1.0.txt
In current Firefox releases you need FFmpeg to play media files.