Wayland-Proxy Load Balancer Helping Firefox Cope With Wayland Issues
phoronix.com
Among the Firefox Wayland bugs, one of the top crash bugs is over a lost connection to a Wayland compositor. For dealing with it is to have a proxy between Firefox and the Wayland compositor to cache messages and prevent compositor message queue overflows.
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Would be interesting if this is more on Firefox side, or on compositor side. I've been running Firefox in Wayland for about 9 months now, without any issues.
this is a wayland issue. Due to how wayland works, it cannot drop messages, this means if the messages stop being accepted (IE. the program becomes very slow and not very responsive) the application will wind up dying. EEVDF helped resolve a lot of these issues. but they arent gone yet.
a fairly easy replication cause is to start a large rust project compile since cargo will thread to oblivion if it gets the chance, then use the PC on wayland. Applications can frequently die, Firefox, MPV, Kate, gnome web, chromium, games, etc. it also doesn't matter what compositor you use right now as gnome, kde sway all share the issue
EEVDF really does help stop a lot of these crashing though
BeOS solved the issue of unresponsive GUIs in the 1990s. The GUI just must never run in the same thread as the logic.
while this is good on theory, when your CPU is being absolutely hammered, you need to re-adjust priorities to make a system responsive again, it's actually not a simple thing to do without a context aware scheduler. Even though EEVDF is pretty good, it still struggles some times
My PC with a 133MHz Pentium 1 processor was pretty responsive all the time back in the day. It's definitely a solved problem.
You're describing Wayland running into issues due to overall high system load, and not been given enough scheduler time to accept messages?
edit: This issue? https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/159 - didn't find anything else matching the description, and personally have never seen that, both on my low specs notebook or my workstation, which probably counts as higher spec.
correct, this is the same issue, this generally really only happens with a sustained all core workload that will consistently leave you cpu at 100%, since if it's not sustained, the kernel will allot some time to the programs, and the crash wont happen
I guess that explains why I'm not seeing it - my workstation has 64 threads and more than enough memory, and on my notebook I'm scheduling load intensive stuff to not interfere with interactive device usage.