UM installed on HP Stream 14, slow browsing

Support & Help Requests Hardware
1

Hi all,
I have just recently bought an HP Stream 14.

I don’t think this isn’t directly UM-related, as with Windows 10 it was slow generally, and browsing too. Also tried Manjaro, looks like a nice distro, but that too was slow browsing. It may just be that HP Stream is a very slow machine. I have read around, and many people say the wifi on the Stream is poor anyway, with one writer recommending a USB wifi dongle.

If I launch FF, it can take at least 4 or 5 seconds before the window becomes visible, landing on ubuntu mate start page.
If I type bbc.co.uk, it can takes between 1 or 4 seconds for page to complete loading.

If FF is already open and I click FF again to get a new window, it’s usually much quicker, just under a sec to get to Ubuntu Mate start page.

Even then, with FF open, I wasn’t using FF for 2 or 3 minutes; I clicked on “Community” on welcome , the window opened straight away but stayed blank for ten seconds before becoming visible. Im guessing sometimes pages do not show until page is complete.

I plumbed for Zesty 64 bit version ( machine has 3.8 Gb ram, 32gb eMMC drive ).

So I was wondering if any users out there on low powered machines or PI/ SBC experience this kind of performance?

Thank you

2

I think your problem stems from two places:

  • Your processor is low-end, and rendering webpages nowadays takes a lot of CPU cycles
  • Your local storage I/O throughput is slow (It’s an SD card soldered on your motherboard)

Yeah those cheap machines can look like attractive options, but each time I see them I can’t bring myself to consider those “real computers”. (32GB internal storage, what the hell?)

3

Hi: I have a stream 11, ff seems to work ok for me, about on par compared to chrome. @ouroumov has a point that the machines are low spec’d, but as a Linux tablet alternative/substitute, I couldn’t be much happier. Price point weighed heavily.

Try latest ff release if not on already and remove legacy extensions.

My version ff 55.0.2 on um16.04.3 running privacy badger as only extension. Seems faster than my rpi3.

4

Thanks, does it really take alot of cpu to render webpages? That’s interesting, but surprising.

I/O ok fair enough, but still, i remember starting FF portable of a stick, (albeit on a winPc) and it loaded no problem.

Also cant help noticing, on my google tablet, takes no time to start chrome and pretty quick to refresh page.

But this comes back to RPI and other SBC-s - starting firefox on this must take ten seconds surely, if it takes nearly that long on an HP stream.?

5

Thanks. I’m on52.0.1. Maybe ill try a smaller footprint browser.

I too have a chromebook, and chromebook is quicker. Also got xfce4 running on the chromebook and it too is quicker.

6

Updating all software has improved things: seems a bit quicker. Will try chrome later. I’m going to mark this as solved now. Thanks ouroumov and jbc.

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@nato Chromium and Chrome does seem to start up, and render web pages faster than Firefox on any system I’ve compared the two. However, I’ve found that I still need Firefox for some web pages to render properly. So best to have both, or all three.

1 Like
8

Cheers @Steven,
I’ll give it a go. I am sort of reluctant to use chromium - unless I’m going mad, I’ve heard or read somewhere that it might be unsafe to use chromium, that it was easy to add spyware, or add stuff that it could control the camera on a laptop. That sort of thing. I’ll stick to chrome for the time being.