Bug 8486 - Firefox unusable with a smart card redirected under non-negligible ping
Summary: Firefox unusable with a smart card redirected under non-negligible ping
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: ThinLinc
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Smart card (show other bugs)
Version: trunk
Hardware: PC Unknown
: P2 Normal
Target Milestone: LowPrio
Assignee: Bugzilla mail exporter
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2025-01-10 16:19 CET by William Sjöblom
Modified: 2025-01-21 13:25 CET (History)
0 users

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Description William Sjöblom cendio 2025-01-10 16:19:25 CET 
Connecting to a ThinLinc server with a smart card plugged in and smart card redirection enabled completely breaks Firefox performance. The issues correlates with the ThinLinc server RTT, with small increases in ping quickly making Firefox unusable.

Here are some measurements taken on the Windows 10 machine in the lab:
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 Ping   Firefox startup time* 
──────────────────────────────
 25ms   26s                  
 50ms   46s                  
 100ms  1min 5s              
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
* Time between the firefox command is run until the start page has fully loaded

The startup performance seem even worse on Fedora 41.

Once Firefox has finally started, it is unbearably slow with more than 25ms ping.

Removing the smart card, disconnecting the reader, or disabling smart card redirection fixes the issue.

Reproduced using the following setup:
* Server: RHEL8 with GNOME, running ThinLinc 4.17.0 and 4.18.0.
* Clients: ThinLinc 4.18.0 client running on Windows 10, Windows 11 and Fedora 41.
Comment 2 William Sjöblom cendio 2025-01-10 16:52:54 CET 
I also did some measurements using XFCE4 on the server side instead GNOME (to isolate this from bug 8295) from a Windows 10 client. The performance improved, but is still far from acceptable.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 Ping   Firefox startup time 
─────────────────────────────
 0ms    3s                   
 25ms   17s                  
 50ms   24s                  
 100ms  42s                  
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The general performance and usability after Firefox's initial startup is still bad.
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