5 Replies Latest reply on Sep 12, 2013 12:00 PM by pathduck

    Best browser to use for RHQ?

    pathduck

      Hi,

      we are currently using a management virtual machine to open RHQ in Firefox (portable v17) and find it runs quite slow client-side. The RHQ server is good but all the client-side scripting really lags the browser, especially since this is a single CPU machine. With many people logged in using RHQ it goes almost to a stop. This is especially on the 'dynamic' pages that shows graphs and the sort (Summary).

       

      For instance I am seeing Firefox use 40-50% cpu when having a couple of tabs with RHQ open.

       

      We are soon upgrading to a better vmware machine, but would like to know about others experiences with other browsers - what browser works best with the GWT scripts?

      Chrome, Opera, Safari etc?

        • 1. Re: Best browser to use for RHQ?
          lkrejci

          I don't think we have a definite answer to this question. Generally the faster the javascript interpreter in the browser, the better performance you'd get, so I guess Chrome and Firefox would be the best bet here but on the other hand, in a virtualized environment, you also might run into memory issues where the winner might not be that clear. So I guess you need to find the proper balance between the capacity of your VMs, the speed of the javascript interpreter and the memory consumption of the browser for yourself.

           

          It would actually be great to hear your findings!

          • 2. Re: Best browser to use for RHQ?
            jayshaughnessy

            One other note, the graphing pages are still using legacy JSF charts, and they are slow to render.  I thin RHQ 4.7 will see those replaced with much better charting.  As for server load generated by clients (like browser sessions), we may need to look into that.  I don't think a large number of GUI sessions has actually been something we've focused on up to this point.

             

            For what it's worth, I like to use Chrome with RHQ.

            • 3. Re: Best browser to use for RHQ?
              pathduck

              It definitely seems so far that Chrome/Chromium is the fastest to use with RHQ. Pages seem to fly when clicking around the UI, and memory use is lower than in Firefox.

               

              Firefox works fine but is a bit heavy on load and memory as said.

              IE6 is not working at all, so no surprise there - IE8 & 9 works fine though, but I don't use them.

               

              Opera does not work at all -  which is a shame since I am partial to Opera and know its JS implementation is fast.

               

              Anyhow that's our findings so far unless someone's got any other suggestions.

              • 4. Re: Re: Best browser to use for RHQ?
                mithomps

                Update September, 2013:

                 

                Chrome/Chromium is the fastest with IE10 in second and FireFox ESR (Download: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html) trailing closely behind. FireFox renders the content the most accurately although at slightly higher resource usage. Notice I mentioned FireFox - Extended Service Release and not normal FireFox. FireFox ESR is the more stable corporate release and is my personal pick for RHQ use -- it is slightly slower but visually, the components from smartGWT render without any glitches.

                 

                As for Opera, we don't compile GWT for Opera. [If you made a big enough fuss we could probably add this in -- maybe. At the expense of larger binaries and increased compile time.]

                We also don't compile for IE6 as it is just abysmal and IE8 is supported but very slow, as its rendering engine is just way behind the modern browser. IE9+ is recommended. Also the d3 graphing library will not render on IE8, so while you can still use the app the menus for graphing features are disabled for IE8.

                 

                Remember RHQ is hundreds of thousands of lines of javascript so choice of javascript rendering engine makes a huge difference in performance -- use the latest browsers for the best experience.

                Of course, we support most all browsers, this is just a recommendation of what's best for using RHQ.

                 

                -- Mike

                • 5. Re: Re: Best browser to use for RHQ?
                  pathduck

                  Thanks for that Mike!

                   

                  I am pretty sure we can live without Opera 12 support, besides they are moving to Chrome as well for their engine. And currently it is just Chrome with the Opera logo so makes no difference really...

                   

                  We use IE 10 and Firefox as well so as long as you compile for those it's golden.

                   

                  cheers,

                  Stian