Epiphany Browser Painfully Slow

[itsmedoofer]

Ok cool will try that then, i only said about dist-upgrade as I saw it recommend in another post related to epiphany and the latest update. Will do without on your recommendation

[itsmedoofer]

Hi,

I installed and tested kiosk on a fresh install tonight, both versions were very slow to load news.bbc.co.uk as was Epiphany. NetSurf and Iceweasel were significantly faster.

I've made a video of, Epiphany, IW and NS loading bbc news that I'll put somewhere tomorrow, the difference is orders of magnitude.

Any thoughts on what else could cause such a difference I've got a card image for testing so quiet happy to test risky bits..

[geneellis]

I'm still having slow issues as well. But I like what someone was saying regarding a DNS issue. That would seem to match the behavior I'm seeing. Thanks for offering to post the video. I am talking with some people at Raspberry as well and will be showing them this thread.

[gkreidl]

Hi,

I installed and tested kiosk on a fresh install tonight, both versions were very slow to load news.bbc.co.uk as was Epiphany. NetSurf and Iceweasel were significantly faster.

I've made a video of, Epiphany, IW and NS loading bbc news that I'll put somewhere tomorrow, the difference is orders of magnitude.

Any thoughts on what else could cause such a difference I've got a card image for testing so quiet happy to test risky bits..

If you tested both kweb and kweb3 and epiphany, of course, it's clear that it's not the browser and not the webkit engine itself which are causing the trouble (kweb uses the old, not updated, webkit1 engine, kweb3 and epiphany the new webkit3 engine). What they all have in common, is libsoup, which has also been updated to a newer version. It's the engine responsible for all network traffic in all webkit browsers.

It would be interesting to see, if people experiencing this problem have the same problem with an older version of Raspbian (before the dist-upgrade, that brought us the new HW accelerated engine). Did any one of you use Midori in the past (same engine)?

It must be a combination of libsoup and special circumstances of your network connection (DNS, proxy, IPv4 vs. IPv6, ISP, router). So the question is, what do you have in common? What does your /etc/resolv.conf say?

[itsmedoofer]

Hi,

Good making progress, must be something in the back-end..

A video of the browser speeds can be seen here http://aniceplace.me.uk/Pi/Browser.mp4

First NetSurf then IceWeasel then Epiphany, all 3 should have been loading from cache as I had loaded the pages previously...

A quick run through of my configuration...

A 512Mb B Connected via Ethernet...

My router is a Sky F@ST2504n (Manufactured by Sagemcom), I use DHCP Address allocation to give the Pi a IP address, I dont touch anything on the Pi for that.... LAN side has IPv6 enabled WAN is IPv4 only, the Pi connects with IPv4.

Locally I do not use a proxy..

I live next door to the telephone exchange my stats are, Down Stream 23999 kbps, Up Stream 1265 kbps and that is with Sky in the UK..

I have flashed a card with 2014-01-07-wheezy-raspbian, tonight I will try kweb, kweb3 & Midori WITHOUT updating and see if that makes a difference... Previously I have used Midori on older releases without issue...

I will also post /etc/resolv.conf from the current and old releases....

Are there specific component I should update that on 2014-01-07-wheezy-raspbian would help narrow down the culprit ?

Thanks,

[gkreidl]

No, just try it on a version before the dist-upgrade (new webkit, epiphany, libsoup and much more).

Years ago I had a similar problem from Ubuntu. While I got normal response times from Windows, each page request needed minutes to get through from Ubuntu . I solved it by using OpenDNS (208.67.222.222) in my router instead of the DNS servers of my ISP.

[itsmedoofer]

Hi,

I am unable to change the DNS servers my router picks up, Sky have the interface locked down unfortunately.. However...

If I edit /etc/resolv.conf to:

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

That should now pick up the OpenDNS servers yeah ? Maybe try googles as well ?

Sky are VERY mainstream and their DNS configuration may have quirks or be MS bias.... Could be an issue....

[gkreidl]

Hi,

I am unable to change the DNS servers my router picks up, Sky have the interface locked down unfortunately.. However...

If I edit /etc/resolv.conf to:

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

That should now pick up the OpenDNS servers yeah ? Maybe try googles as well ?

Sky are VERY mainstream and their DNS configuration may have quirks or be MS bias.... Could be an issue....

Give it a try. But it may be reset when you boot again (via DHCP)

[geneellis]

Yes, please report back. Am very interesting in your findings. Thank you.

[itsmedoofer]

Hi,

I've made some progress tonight with the help of you guys, the issue is indeed DNS related, but is only applicable with the webkit browsers with the September release of Raspbian and "probably" certain types of ADSL router...

My /etc/resolv.conf had:-

nameserver 192.168.0.1 <- My broadband router

Changing this to the google or OpenDNS server and Epiphany works as advertised...

For Iceweasel & Netsurf the change made no difference....

I tried to install Minimal Kiosk Browser on the January image but there were lots of dependency issues and it wouldnt go, however Midori works fine and full speed.

Something must have changed in the latest release that does not play nicely with mine and others routers, I suspect if you manually assign an IP address to the PI you will not see this problem....

So how to fix.... How can I still use my router to assign a IP address but force the Pi to use a different IP address ?

[gkreidl]

Thanks for your efforts investigating this problem! (I've sent you a PM)

I'll report the problem to the collabora team (who are responsible for the accelerated browser package and still working on bug fixes). Could you please check, which libsoup version is installed in the January image?

It would be helpful if all people having this problem could report their ISP / router combination here.

Meanwhile there are 3 possible solutions:

1) If your router allows you (usually in the LAN section) to set a different DNS address which is used instead of the one provided by the ISP, set it to 208.67.222.222 or 8.8.8.8. (Most routers do).

2) If that is not possible, give your RPi a fixed IP and manually edit /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
(tutorial about setting up a fixed IP:
https://www.modmypi.com/blog/tutorial-h ... ip-address

3) Dirty solution if both is not possible or you have a reason to use DHCP:
create a file /etc/resolv.conf.res
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

create a script file containing:
sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf.res /etc/resolv.conf

Run this this at boot time, after the connection has been set up.

[geneellis]

Outstanding. Thank you everyone. We have some web apps that we're trying to launch and this is throwing a huge wrench in the development. Please keep the thread posted with any updates. I'll do the same. Thanks.

[itsmedoofer]

Hi,

I’ll have to look at the January stuff tonight, I’ve not got access to the Pi during the day to change the card unfortunately...

I have done some more trials this morning albeit quite crude, from what I can see it is an issue between my router and the Epiphany back end and not external DNS servers.

Upon boot my resolv.conf has nameserver set to 192.168.0.1, as already stated of I change this to OpenDNS (208.67.222.222) things start to work, however things still work if I put in the DNS servers my router has been assigned (90.207.238.97 & 90.207.238.99) so everything is pointing to an incompatibility between the router and the Epiphany back end from what I can see. This incompatibility only seems to have come to light since the September image release....

For simplicity I think I’m going to assign the Pi a fixed IP, I really like the address reservation method but if its going to cause issues it will have to go..

For reference the Sagemcom F@ST2504n as supplied to UK Sky customers has a Broadcom BCM 6362 SoC chipset...

For me the issue seems to be resolved by assigning a static and I’m happy with that fix, if anyone from the collabora team or gkreidl would like me to trial anything though I would be more than happy to help, just PM...

[SQUAREHEAD]

Hi guys i too am having this same issue, Epipifany browser is unusually slow taking upto 3 minuets to load a BBC.co.uk page yet net surf is working quite well.

Has anyone came up with a solution for this?

Matt

[itsmedoofer]

As above, assign a static IP address to your Pi and explicitly set either opendns or google nameservers, worked for me.

[gkreidl]

Which ISP and router / modem?

[SQUAREHEAD]

As above, assign a static IP address to your Pi and explicitly set either opendns or google nameservers, worked for me.

I have done this and set the google DNS server but its still the same, i'm using a A+ if that helps perhaps i'm simply running out of memory. Off topic do you know how to play HTML 5 videos on NetSurf

[fruitoftheloom]

As above, assign a static IP address to your Pi and explicitly set either opendns or google nameservers, worked for me.

I have done this and set the google DNS server but its still the same, i'm using a A+ if that helps perhaps i'm simply running out of memory. Off topic do you know how to play HTML 5 videos on NetSurf

https://html5test.com will interagrate what if any HTML5 capabilities the web browser supports

OpenElec is better suited to playing media...

[Richard-TX]

Thanks for your efforts investigating this problem! (I've sent you a PM)

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create a script file containing:
sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf.res /etc/resolv.conf

Run this this at boot time, after the connection has been set up.

Assuming you are running raspbian, you could avoid the whole resolv.conf issue by performing the following.

apt-get remove resolvconf
edit /etc/resolv.conf manually and put in nameserver, search and domain.

Now resolv.conf will not be overwritten every time the system is booted. I hate overzealous programmers trying to "make things easier" when all they do is make things more complicated. Keeping things simple is a good thing.

[DougieLawson]

I have done this and set the google DNS server but its still the same, i'm using a A+ if that helps perhaps i'm simply running out of memory.

Epiphany and all other web browsers are all memory hogs. Epiphany going to struggle on a B+. Running out of memory pushes Linux into swapping. Swapping with the swapfile on a glacially slow SDCard is never going to work. Move your task off the Raspberry Pi if you need to use a web browser.

[cyrano]

Could it be DNSsec?

I've had some problems with some servers when the ISP started DNSsec rollout. It could be interesting to test if your connection already follows DNSsec:

http://dnssec.vs.uni-due.de/

The problem I encountered was sites not loading because of DNSsec. The resulting error in the browser looks like a "DNS entry not found", but it should mean some DNS server along the route simply doesn't support DNSsec. Combined with ipV6, this produces a situation which is hard to trouble-shoot.

[SQUAREHEAD]

I have done this and set the google DNS server but its still the same, i'm using a A+ if that helps perhaps i'm simply running out of memory.

Epiphany and all other web browsers are all memory hogs. Epiphany going to struggle on a B+. Running out of memory pushes Linux into swapping. Swapping with the swapfile on a glacially slow SDCard is never going to work. Move your task off the Raspberry Pi if you need to use a web browser.

But dont you find it strange that Netsurf is running at normal speed and Epiphany isn't, im also running 1080p video on XBMC very smoothly with no problems. Epiphany seems to be the only issue with my setup.

[DougieLawson]

I don't know, because I don't use my Raspberry Pis for web browsing, that's all done on my laptop.

[gkreidl]

But dont you find it strange that Netsurf is running at normal speed and Epiphany isn't, im also running 1080p video on XBMC very smoothly with no problems. Epiphany seems to be the only issue with my setup.

Netsurf is a much smaller browser and doesn't support many modern web features (HTML5, Javascript).

Epiphany isn't that slow, but is engine needs quite a lot of resources and I don't think you can run it with just 256 MB memory (and I'm quite sure that you need at least 64 MByte GPU memory for the hardware accrleration).

[PaulRowntree]

I have been working with my new B+/NOOBS/Raspbian this weekend, and have exactly the same symptoms. I am going by WiFi (Ourlink dongle), with minutes before Epiphany even tries to show a page, while NetSurf is 4-8 seconds to get a news site up and showing (even with both running at the same time, same machine) The DNS address is exactly the same as the other 7 WiFi devices in the house use, and it pings as expected. The router is provided with my Bell Fibe service (SageMCom), and is normally very reliable.
Cheers!