Suggestions to troubleshoot Jupyter Notebook sluggish in browser?

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Xtian Simon

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Aug 15, 2017, 5:56:37 AM8/15/17
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After a recent system update on Archlinux (on 7/14 and 8/5), I've been experiencing noticeably sluggish rendering and browser interaction. For example,

- double clicking on a word or line to select text is slow at best if it selects the line at all.
- When the page loads, all notebook cells are blank until I click into them.

Using the latest Jupyter, Python 3, and Chromium stack on the Archlinux platform.

I don't have the same errors on other Chromium webpages--just Jupyter notebooks. And only recently.

The typical troubleshooting I would use:
- check disk usage. None of my partitions are over 54% full.
- downgrade packages. So far just downgraded Chromium.

Any suggestions where I should troubleshoot next?

Thomas Kluyver

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Aug 15, 2017, 6:06:57 AM8/15/17
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Do you have any extensions installed in Chromium? Does it work if you try in Firefox?

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Xtian Simon

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Aug 15, 2017, 9:30:39 PM8/15/17
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When I read your suggestion takowl, I slapped my forehead--why didn't I think of that?
Unfortunately, I wasn't so lucky. I tried Firefox and I started Chromium with all (but a bookmark plugin) turned off--same problems.

What else?

On Tuesday, August 15, 2017 at 5:06:57 AM UTC-5, takowl wrote:
Do you have any extensions installed in Chromium? Does it work if you try in Firefox?
On 15 August 2017 at 10:56, Xtian Simon <xtian...@gmail.com> wrote:
After a recent system update on Archlinux (on 7/14 and 8/5), I've been experiencing noticeably sluggish rendering and browser interaction. For example,

- double clicking on a word or line to select text is slow at best if it selects the line at all.
- When the page loads, all notebook cells are blank until I click into them.

Using the latest Jupyter, Python 3, and Chromium stack on the Archlinux platform.

I don't have the same errors on other Chromium webpages--just Jupyter notebooks. And only recently.

The typical troubleshooting I would use:
- check disk usage. None of my partitions are over 54% full.
- downgrade packages. So far just downgraded Chromium.

Any suggestions where I should troubleshoot next?

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Thomas Kluyver

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Aug 17, 2017, 6:26:50 AM8/17/17
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I'm pretty mystified - I don't remember hearing about those symptoms before. Do you have any Jupyter extensions installed, or any custom configuration?

You could try installing the 5.1 release candidate - I don't really expect it to make a difference, but you never know:

pip install --upgrade --pre notebook

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Xtian Simon

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Aug 18, 2017, 3:37:31 PM8/18/17
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Hmm.
The only config settings I've messed with are in `jupyter_notebook_config.py`. These are just user and browser preferences. And I created a file `nbconfig/notebook.json` for line wrapping.

My version of Python 3, Jupyter, and all the major Python modules is installed with Archlinux's rolling release. This means every few weeks I update the whole of my Linux package and system. I guess that would mean I'm on the leading (not bleeding) edge of stable releases. (^_^)

My Lenovo is about eight years old (ouch). It has 4G of RAM, and Intel Core 2 Duo (2.53 GHz).  I dunno, Is Jupyter platform known for being problematic on older systems?

If there are any other users of older systems--have tips for running Jupyter on older systems? Maybe this would help?

Thomas Kluyver

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Aug 18, 2017, 3:43:44 PM8/18/17
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On 18 August 2017 at 20:37, Xtian Simon <xtian...@gmail.com> wrote:
The only config settings I've messed with are in `jupyter_notebook_config.py`. These are just user and browser preferences. And I created a file `nbconfig/notebook.json` for line wrapping.

Can you try commenting them out/moving the files aside to see if it's the same with a blank config? You can also try this by setting the environment variable JUPYTER_NO_CONFIG=1 .
 
My Lenovo is about eight years old (ouch). It has 4G of RAM, and Intel Core 2 Duo (2.53 GHz).  I dunno, Is Jupyter platform known for being problematic on older systems?

It's not the most efficient thing out there, but those specs should be fine.

Xtian Simon

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Aug 20, 2017, 10:48:56 AM8/20/17
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Looks like the line wrapping was causing the slowdown. Checking the dates of my .bak file of the original config file, I see I did this the day after a big update.
Very confusing--system--browser--python--jupyter--to try to troubleshoot.

Thanks for your help Takowl

This setting file worked, but it slowed down my Core 2 Duo 2.5Ghz processor maybe?
[xtian nbconfig]$ cat notebook.json.wraplines
{
  "MarkdownCell": {
    "cm_config": {
      "lineWrapping": true
    }
  },
  "CodeCell": {
    "cm_config": {
      "lineWrapping": true
    }
  },
  "Cell": {
    "cm_config": {
      "lineNumbers": true
    }
  }

Thomas Kluyver

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Aug 20, 2017, 12:23:40 PM8/20/17
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Weird, I don't know why line wrapping would make it noticeably slower (unless you have enormously long lines). Thanks for the follow up, anyway.

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