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Firefox on Linux: What

I've been using Firefox on Linux because it is overall the best choice, but the performance is appalling. It is SO SLOW. And it has always been this way across multiple machines and Linux versions.

For example, when I try to use this Javascript asteroids doohickey, I can barely move the ship let alone do anything useful, because it just delays for a large portion of a second (like maybe 300-500 ms) on pretty much every frame.

This morning, though, I discovered something.

Firefox runs perfectly smoothly on Linux over VNC.

The same Linux box, the same Firefox environment, except that I started vncserver and then ran Firefox inside it, then connected to the VNC server at localhost.

What is this!

Edit: Solution, reproduced here:

To xorg.conf, Section "Device":

Option "PixmapCacheSize" "300000"
Option "OnDemandVBlankInterrupts" "True"

On command-line at desktop startup:

nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1