Solved Chromium slow

For a month or two, I've noticed Chromium running very slow. For example, I click on a tab to quit out of it and there's maybe a full second delay before that tab closes. I noticed it before upgrading to 13.0-RELEASE. top doesn't show anything unusual.

I just now decided to start investigating this but did I miss a memo somewhere?
 
I only ever noticed such kind of slowness in chromium when the machine was heavily swapping, or when disk I/O was slow (happened a few times as I have /home on NFS). Other than that, I have no idea, working at normal speed here.
 
I have performance issues with chromium - I am hoping to improve the user experience. I notice a few things with chromium:

0. when working remotely, I notice latency between key presses and when the key is finally rendered on the screen. It is much worse when playing audio or watching videos remotely. We use citrix receiver. Is this because of a plugin that is available on Linux / Windows / Mac, but not FreeBSD?
1. slow / synchronous I/O - when opening multiple tabs quickly, it hangs for a few seconds while the UI catches up - I live with this, it isn't terrible, but seems like an easy fix, does it just come down to disk I/O? I have 24 G of ram and am using ZFS. My system has been up for weeks and I use chromium everyday, shouldn't it be in ARC?
2. when loading youtube, the page takes 5 seconds before rendering the images
 
I run chromium with noscript, vimium, blank new tab, dark mode (old eyes, but an investment in a new monitor has almost elimanated the need for it--so far), and ublock orig, and speed is fine here, slightly, but not greatly, faster than firefox. This is on a few machines, none of them great, but none of them underpowered either.
It sometimes seems a bit slow to start if the machine is rebooted, but is fine after that, even when completely closed and opened later. None of these machines are under very heavy load though. No issues with video or audio.
 
I haven't used FB Messenger's group call for awhile, today had to ― chromium tab crashes as soon as the group call established. It was working fine 2-3 months ago.
 
drhowarddrfine non-functional sync is a deliberate decision by google, see for example https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/chromium-sync-google-api-removed

But apart from that, I'm getting the impression that chromium gets buggier … or maybe I was just luckier in the past. It seems to have tons of little problems that change from time to time. My "special" example: PR 255128

The really weird thing is I couldn't reproduce it in a different window manager than FVWM. But both fvwm2 and fvwm3 are affected and earlier versions of chromium worked fine.

I also noticed that, while MS Teams works in the browser, it crashes as soon as someone starts sharing their screen. Don't know whether this worked in earlier versions.

Thinking about switching back to www/firefox after many years of prefering chromium…

Still, I never had a problem with chromium being slow… 🤷‍♂️
 
Thinking about switching back to www/firefox after many years of prefering chromium
I'm mostly using Firefox and like it better. However, certain things, like group calls of various providers (Google, FB, Zoom etc.) are much better supported in Chromium. So I keep both browsers installed, but launch Chromium from time to time.
 
Firefox does indeed work better as an interactive browser, but I like the ability to automate or drive the browser. Chromium works better on that front. Aside from that, Firefox is probably the better bet.
 
I was hoping to test out Firefox today for my Citrix Receiver remote desktop setup; however, Firefox is running @ 100% CPU for my setup - 2 screens (1 3440x1440, 2: 1680x1050). Chromium runs much better at that resolution, but when I play audio over Citrix Receiver, it ends up crackled. The latency issue seems to be ever present with Firefox when running Citrix Receiver whereas for Chromium, it seems it is more tied to trying to play audio through it.
 
I think I will have to live with it - it runs well *MOST* of the time, I'm just trying to see what I can do eliminate the pain I experience on the desktop user experience.
 
tOsYZYny I'm guessing it had something to do with a package update somewhere in the last week or two. That's all I've done since I went on vacation and few other things.
 
I bailed out after a couple of hours waiting for the compile to finish, and installed the chromium package. Deleting the 'work' directory in the port saved about 8GB of filespace!

Anyway the application didn't load, apparently due to the wrong permissions in the /usr/local/lib/libopenh264* files. Now sorted!
 
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