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.
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.