WebKit-based applications are unusably sluggish in Utopic

[Adam Dingle]

Today I made a fresh install of the latest daily build of 14.10 (Utopic). Unfortunately applications that use WebKit, including Geary and Epiphany, are now strangely sluggish. When I type characters (e.g. in a new message in Geary or in a form field in Epiphany) they don't echo for several seconds. (During that time the system is apparently not consuming CPU.) Scrolling through any page that contains a form field in Epiphany is similarly painfully sluggish.

[Iain Lane (laney)]

Do you mean since the update to 2.4.5? Before that we had 2.4.4 which is also in trusty-proposed (if you want to try that to rule in/out this version of webkit) and I didn't hear any reports of such behaviour.

I'm afraid I don't see the same here on either of my machines. Perhaps #webkitgtk+ (freenode) could help more specifically.

[Adam Dingle (adam-yorba)]

Iain, thanks for the response. I'm not actually sure whether I had WebKitGTK 2.4.4 or 2.4.5, and I can't check now since I had to drop back to Trusty since this bug affected me greatly. I'll stay on Trusty for the moment - I'll be curious to see if any others report this behavior. It definitely occurred even after a completely clean install from the latest Utopic daily ISO.

[Iain Lane (laney)]

trusty-updates just got 2.4.4 and I'll push 2.4.5 to trusty-proposed today so you can see if either of these versions makes this happen on 14.04 for you

[Adam Dingle (adam-yorba)]

I just applied updates on Trusty and got WebKitGTK 2.4.4. I'm not seeing the sluggish behavior I described here. I'll look forward to trying 2.4.5 once it's available to see if that causes the problem.

[Adam Dingle (adam-yorba)]

Iain, I still don't see WebKitGTK 2.4.5 in trusty-proposed - is it coming soon?

[Iain Lane (laney)]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 11:34:57AM -0000, Adam Dingle wrote:
> Iain, I still don't see WebKitGTK 2.4.5 in trusty-proposed - is it
> coming soon?

It's in the queue awaiting review from somebody in the SRU team - you
can track the progress on bug #1371041. Hopefully won't be too long.

--
Iain Lane [ <email address hidden> ]
Debian Developer [ <email address hidden> ]
Ubuntu Developer [ <email address hidden> ]

[Michael Catanzaro (mike-catanzaro)]

Try running without DRI3:

export LIBGL_DRI3_DISABLE=1

Does that fix the issue?

See also
https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-gtk/2014-September/002067.html

[Adam Dingle (adam-yorba)]

Yes, running with LIBGL_DRI3_DISABLE=1 does fix the issue. Thanks for this information!