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[LUG] Browser rendering

 

Problem with browsers on the HP 450.
Debian Stable (mostly) fully patched
Version 1.32.106 Chromium: 96.0.4664.45 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Both recent versions (a few weeks / months(?)) of Brave, and Chromium exhibit 
the problem.

When video is rendered, or when large numbers of images are rendered, and I 
think when the focus is changed or other manipulations of the window quite 
frequently the browser performance degrades, the screen doesn't fully refresh, 
so you might see part of a different tab, or half (with split vertical) of a 
web page scroll and the over side not redrawn. CPU is sometimes but not always 
high, once the problem starts the rendered parts of the browser are useless 
until I close and restart it. I can usually start "task manager" within the 
browser and nothing untowards is seen in CPU, memory or GPU usage (sigh). 
Developers tools is less reliable to start, but is useless as these apps throw 
a ⎄ gazillion warnings and the performance degradation affects Dev tools.

Most reproducible way is to start YouTube, Discord, or Zoom in the browser, 
and then do something else, but sometimes it is triggered with less intensive 
browsing.

I also see unexpected anomalous highlighting of the browser tabs (I don't 
think this is a "mouse over" event but it looks like it, although sometimes 
all the unselected tabs highlight in the browser chrome, alternating with 
focus on the current tab).

Since it is multiple browsers it can't be profile.

I've tried the obvious (plugins etc), but fairly confident this is either 
rendering (or less likely some sort of KDE/X change).

Currently working through the browser flags (e.g. brave://flags) to see if this 
is some sort of hardware acceleration that is configurable. The board has some 
weird Intel built in card, which is dual headed (as far as X is concerned but 
the other head is disabled). It only really offers SKIA acceleration in the 
graphics hardware.

Search shows a few other people with similar but nothing concrete. 

Running the same apps as standalone apps doesn't create the same issues, but 
who wants to run those apps natively?

Probably Google's way of telling me to toss the hardware, but it is a bug, and 
it was introduced not so long ago, and now I feel I should fix it.

Only error that might be related - xsession has:

kde.dataengine.mpris: "org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.chromium.instance2659154" does 
not implement org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties correctly

But I think that is probably just telling me I can't use my KDE multimedia 
controls.

I do see some weird behaviour of the KDE desktop with task manager bar gaining 
and losing various apps, usually the last one closed flickering back into life, 
or multiple browser entries appearing, so some sort of KDE issue likely. Not 
sure if this is just a result of the issues, or a symptom.

Any ideas for consistent reproduction, or for troubleshooting? Think I am 
about ready to binary chop through the different releases of Brave till I find 
which one broke things (but will be very annoyed if it isn' t the browser that 
changed).

Also I think the problem has got worse (in one distinct step) since it started 
- which sounds crazy, but I think it started, and then a later change may have 
made it more frequent, since it is now really annoying, where as when it 
started it was a rare event. I might just be doing more video.



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