A few months ago, I got tired of remembering to take my MacBook Pro to the ham shack with me whenever I wanted to operate amateur radio digital modes like FT8, and decided I wanted to dedicate some hardware to rig control, logging, and digital operations. I had no spare macOS hardware around, apart from a 10+ year old 21″ iMac that was sitting in a pile of stuff, waiting for me to find the time to haul it all to the electronics recycling facility. Then I wondered: The old iMac may not run current macOS, and may not even run old macOS very well… but would it run Linux well? It did — at least until it didn’t.
What I began to observe was that the computer initially ran great. But the longer I kept it up and logged-in, the slower it got. That can be caused by a lot of things, but the usual source is buggy software that’s eating-up resources. This was more or less proven by the fact that I could restart the machine, or even just log out and back in again, and things would once again work nicely… for a while.
At some random point, the system would start hanging inexplicably for multiple seconds. Software was painfully slow to load. Task switching became problematic. In a few cases, the system would seize-up completely, requiring a forced reboot.
The only common thread was my propensity to keep Firefox running. My ham software, on the other hand, I’d start-up, use, and then close. I have a bad habit, formed on the Mac with Safari, where I keep the browser open at all times, and there are multiple tabs open that I simply don’t want to forget about. Of course, those tabs consume resources, but I’ve rarely had that be an issue. Until now.
One symptom was that the tab for the PSK Reporter (pskreporter.info) map display, which I use regularly when I operate FT8 or FT4, was particularly balky and slow. And if I could get Firefox closed (vs. just hanging), my system would speed-up again. I then experimented with keeping PSK Reporter closed when I was done hamming, and sure enough, that alone was sufficient to restore overall system performance. In short, problem identified.
Whether it’s Firefox’s or PSK Reporter’s “fault” is sort of immaterial, but it doesn’t feel to me like a website’s code should be able to break a web browser, and in turn, destabilize an entire computer. But there you go.
The Solution
Since I like keeping PSK Reporter open, I decided the best bet was to use a different web browser specifically for that purpose. There are, of course, lots of options for Linux, but many of them leverage Firefox’s code base. I wanted something with a different rendering engine entirely, and doing some homework, I settled on Gnome’s “Web” — also known as Epiphany — which uses WebKit as its rendering engine (well, technically, the WebKitGTK port).
After several days now, Web has proven itself. I’ve kept a single tab in Web open to the map display for PSK Reporter, and it simply works, and keeps working, without slowing down the rest of the system. As I write this, it’s been loaded and active for five days now, continuously, and hasn’t acted-up once. (With Firefox, the performance hits would begin within hours of loading the PSK Reporter map.)
Because the iMac in question is a bit underpowered (and just plain old), overall performance isn’t in the “blows me away” class by any stretch of the imagination. It has an old, slow, spinning disc hard drive (operating at 5,400 RPM), constrained memory (8 Gig), and a pretty marginal CPU (an Intel Core i5-4570R running at 2.70GHz). I didn’t buy this machine — I was charged with wiping the data and getting it recycled after a friend died — but I doubt it was a great performer even when it was new a decade ago.
At least now, I’m not longer ready to throw it back on the recycle pile. But, I still do wonder what’s up with Firefox and the one particular website in question, although I’d wager it’s a Firefox bug of some sort or another, and probably yet another reason to choose something else for the longer-term.