Hi All,
Last week I migrated my Secondary PC from Leap 15.3 to 15.4. During the weekend I connected to the video streams of the Dutch NPO to watch the live streams of the PinkPop festival. Obviously this stream is running for a long time as it hosted the full music festival.
The CPU usage starts immediately at 15% and grows over a couple of hours towards 40%. Even worse, when it hits that limit the video stream is no longer stable, with continues hiccups of several seconds. I got about two hours of uninterrupted streams but then the stream fails. I found that when I quit firefox and restart it the process starts from the beginning, so the second time I can once again watch uninterrupted for 1 or 1.5 hours.
I have tested a few streams and they all are high in CPU. That goes obviously all npo.nl streams but also for sites like ted, vimeo, wdr.de, PBS and youtube. In all cases the PC consumes high CPU between 15 and 40% and processes like firefox, Web content and WebExtensions are running towards over 100% core capacity. Tough usually the streams are not running for hours at the time so it was only this weekend I noticed a real problem and started to investigate it.
Running the same streams in my primary PC, with OpenSUSE 15.3, doesn’t have this problem. I also never has experienced this problem in the old PC when it was still running 15.3.
I tested this behavior also in a VirtualBox guest running 15.4. I tested with the current FireFox 91.10 version, the older available 91.x fixlevels and with the 101.0 version from OBS. They all have the same behaviour.
Since both 15.3 and 15.4 have basically the same FireFox version I expect it’s not so much an issue with Firefox itself but with some component specifically for OpenSUSE 15.4.
Playing videos in players like VLC performs normal. So it looks like it has to do with webstreams. I attempted to open sites in Chromium and Konquorer but I couldn’t get past the DRM so I’m not able to play streams in there at all.
Primary PC:
OpenSUSE Leap 15.3
AMD Ryzen-9 16 core
Gforce RTX2060
Nvidia drivers
VirtualBox Guest running in Primary PC
OpenSUSE Leap 15.4
4 virtual processor AMD Ryzen-9
VMVSGA video
Kernel driver VMWGFX
Secondary PC:
OpenSUSE Leap 15.4
AMD FX 8350 8 core
Gforce GT730
Nvidia Drivers
Kernel module Nouveau Nvidia
Applicable Processes Secondary PC:
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
root 1 0 0 13:45 ? 00:00:01 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --switched-root --system --deserialize 30
root 1322 1 0 13:45 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/sddm
root 1830 1322 0 13:47 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/sddm/sddm-helper --socket /tmp/sddm-authedcc23e8-5880-4204-b39a-8ae1db238f07 --id 1 --start /usr/bin/startplasma-x11 --user sleeuwen
sleeuwen 1841 1830 0 13:47 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/startplasma-x11
sleeuwen 1934 1841 0 13:47 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/plasma_session
sleeuwen 2007 1934 0 13:47 ? 00:00:28 /usr/bin/plasmashell
sleeuwen 29391 2007 34 18:04 ? 00:00:21 /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox
sleeuwen 29459 29391 0 18:04 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox -contentproc -parentBuildID 20220523115307 -prefsLen 1 -prefMapSize 241738 -appdir /usr/lib64/firefox/browser 29391 true socket
sleeuwen 29544 29391 10 18:04 ? 00:00:06 /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 2 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 5062 -prefMapSize 241738 -jsInit 285636 -parentBuildID 20220523115307 -appdir /usr/lib64/firefox/browser 29391 true tab
sleeuwen 29587 29391 0 18:04 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/mozilla/kmozillahelper
sleeuwen 29614 29391 32 18:04 ? 00:00:19 /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 3 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 5852 -prefMapSize 241738 -jsInit 285636 -parentBuildID 20220523115307 -appdir /usr/lib64/firefox/browser 29391 true tab
sleeuwen 29683 29391 0 18:05 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 4 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 5852 -prefMapSize 241738 -jsInit 285636 -parentBuildID 20220523115307 -appdir /usr/lib64/firefox/browser 29391 true tab
sleeuwen 29708 29391 0 18:05 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox -contentproc -parentBuildID 20220523115307 -prefsLen 5852 -prefMapSize 241738 -appdir /usr/lib64/firefox/browser 29391 true rdd
sleeuwen 29728 29391 19 18:05 ? 00:00:09 /usr/lib64/firefox/plugin-container /srv/home/sleeuwen/.mozilla/firefox/oyuwryua.default-release/gmp-widevinecdm/4.10.2449.0 29391 true gmplugin
sleeuwen 29792 19051 0 18:05 pts/2 00:00:00 /bin/bash
The top processes at the start of the stream:
29614 sleeuwen 20 0 2989288 342256 197724 S 36,54 2,112 0:34.28 Web Content
29391 sleeuwen 20 0 4246548 439468 215736 S 33,55 2,712 0:31.73 firefox
29728 sleeuwen 20 0 425540 68172 43388 S 23,59 0,421 0:19.97 MainThread
29544 sleeuwen 20 0 2969320 295472 95476 S 12,62 1,823 0:09.62 WebExtensions
The top processes at the time the webstream starts to fail:
29544 sleeuwen 20 0 3444456 700748 96180 R 116,9 4,324 73:05.50 WebExtensions
29391 sleeuwen 20 0 4984748 916912 240520 R 100,0 5,657 65:59.63 firefox
29614 sleeuwen 20 0 3225168 556068 162628 S 40,53 3,431 43:44.25 Web Content
29728 sleeuwen 20 0 425540 68848 43580 S 19,93 0,425 24:11.55 MainThread
So the Video stream starts at 15%, grows towards 40% while processes start at 35%, grow towards 120%. Similar load is observed in the virtual guest in VBOX, but within the guest the numbers are even higher, easily way above 100% for the processes (obviously as it is virtualized). The host will show over 300% CPU in the virtualbox process.
All mentioned webstreams have start the same processes, in vimeo I also noticed a process called RDD process with high load.
So the issue is a high CPU load to start with. In my Leap 15.3 the CPU load is only 1 or 2%, in Leap 15.4 it starts already at 15%. That’s wrong to start with. But when the application becomes unusable after some time due to a very high CPU load it’s really annoying (and expensive too, the power usage obviously has increased as well in Leap 15.4).
Any idea what to do?
Regards, Berry.