Why are websites (basic JS websites, like e.g. trading platforms) slow on Qubes? Will this ever be solved?

User Support
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Yes, I have disabled “acceleration” in Firefox, which improves performance but nowhere close to being enough. Websites with even a little bit of JS interactivity in them, not to mention ones showing interactive charts and ability to trade markets, are slow enough to be practically useless.

I’m not dunking on anyone. I understand there are costs to the added security. I just want to understand the reasons.

  1. Is the reason fundamentally the lack of GPU capability in Qubes?
  2. Will this ever get solved? I heard when Wayland becomes ready and replaces X, full GPU capability will be possible on Qubes and Qubes will become just as usable as any other Linux. Is this true?
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yes

I hope so

I’m not sure Wayland will magically solve the GPU separation issue… and it may not be available before a while :frowning:

the Qubes OS way is to throw more CPU to solve problems at the moment

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Can you share these websites?

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For instance when I simply browse through charts on tradingview.com on Firefox, my Qubes is obviously far slower/laggier than on non-Qubes.

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TradingView works fine for me on Firefox with 2 vCPUs. Could be because I have a newer CPU.

What template are you using and what’s your CPU?

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FWIW I’ve asked on this, and users with relatively old CPU report no
problems with TradingView

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As a workaround you could try the TradingView Desktop App: TradingView Desktop Application

Should perform much better than Firefox.

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Template: fedora-38, 3 vCPUs, max memory 20GB. (Machine RAM 64 GB)

CPU: Intel Core i7-10510U (Comet Lake), Active (fan) Cooling 4 Cores, 8 Threads, up to 4.9GHz

This came as part of my “Librem Mini v2” machine: Purism– Librem Mini I bought it because I wanted a disabled Intel ME.

Is this CPU known to be too slow? cc @unman

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Accept the fact that it will be slower on Qubes than on anything else.

That being said, it shouldn’t be:
slow enough to be practically useless

You have good CPU, but there are many factors that may affect this, such as resolution and amount of pixels, other active qubes, etc.

Leave only necessary qubes needed(sys-firewall, sys-net, etc)
Start with low resolution (1080p) and relevant window size

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Are you using the Firefox that comes with the template?

I always get slow performance with it, no matter how many vCPUs I add to the qube. It might be related to the patches they use when they package it. If I use the binary from the official website or the flatpak package, everything works ok, even with 2 vCPUs.

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Many sites perform better in Chrome than Firefox, even on non-Qubes systems. That might also be worth checking.

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Thanks, this appeared to help a lot. However I also noticed using the Firefox (“Firefox ESR”) from the debian (debian-11 or debian-12-xfce in my case) templates was also a similar improvement. @DVM did you try on debian too?

I wonder why this got messed up on the fedora (fedora-38 or fedora-38-xfce in my case) templates. The slowdown is striking on e.g. video playback in the browser.

Worth repeating: Yes, in all cases did I disable hardware acceleration in the Firefox settings.

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I don’t use Firefox ESR from the Debian template, so I can’t say if it’s better. But what I can say is that I never had any problems with the Firefox package coming from Mozilla, they even recently released an apt repo if you want to get the stable Firefox release with the upgrade handled by apt.