Chromium very slow, Firefox OK

[MarineW29]

Hi,

I installed OpenPlotter 3 on a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB).
Right now, I'm working on it via RealVNC. It's quite responsive, except when I browse with Chromium which is really slow. For example, when I change pages in the Signal K web app. I haven't installed any extensions in Chromium.
I saw on the Internet that many people have problems with slow Chromium on Raspberry.
I installed Firefox, and it's really much faster !

My questions :
- Does anyone have the same slowness problem with Chromium ? Is there any way to fix this ?
- If not, is it OK to use Firefox instead ? I read it wasn't a good idea here
- How to open Firefox instead of Chromimum by clicking the "Web browser" or "Signal K" buttons in the top toolbar of OpenPlotter ? I already set Firefox as default browser in Firefox settings and restarted the Raspberry, but it's not better.

Thanks

[PaddyB]

yeah it is slow, I don't use vnc much but use brave on the laptop to view the webpages instead of vnv into the pi & running a web browser on there.
so on the openplotter network point the laptop browser at 10.10.10.1:3000

[MarineW29]

Thanks for your feedback PaddyB. Yes, it is probably easier to access OpenPlotter web applications from another device.
But it's too bad that a basic app like Chromium doesn't work properly.

[PaddyB]

Thanks for your feedback PaddyB. Yes, it is probably easier to access OpenPlotter web applications from another device.
But it's too bad that a basic app like Chromium doesn't work properly.

It is frustrating yes,I'm on a Pi 3 as well and most of the time I'm in signalk so use the laptop, getting chromium in the Pi when using a monitor is not rapid thing. 
I've never had a good time using a 8Gb card, 32Gb SD card I use now and up the swap file size, how to do that is on the web somewhere. 

If this is your first time it would be really interesting in a little while to hear how you got on with signalk, that's an active project and they are always interested in how to make things better or fix anything which is broken. Specifically the interface, be great to hear about anything which didn't make sense or wasn't very obvious.

[baltika_no_9]

- How to open Firefox instead of Chromimum by clicking the "Web browser" or "Signal K" buttons in the top toolbar of OpenPlotter ?

Just add the Firefox icon to the Application launch bar and delete the Chromium one.

Right click on the task bar
Select Add/Remove Panel Items
Select Application Launch Bar
Select Preferences
Fro the right hand panel select Internet>Firefox ESR and click Add
Move it up or down as you wish

While you are there you can select the Chromium icon if you like and press delete

I never use the Signalk icon in the taskbar so I've deleted that too. Instead I have it bookmarked in Firefox (localhost:3000/admin/#/dashboard) and select it from there. However if you want to retain and use the signalk icon in the task bar and make it open Firefox you can do this:

Start>Preferences>Main Menu Editor
In the LH panel select Openplotter
In the RH panel select SignalK
Clickl Properties
Delete the text in the Command box and replace it with:

Code:

/usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr  http://localhost:3000

Note that if you do it this way it is possible that future updates to Openplotter will overwrite it. That's why I bookmark it in Firefox.

[MarineW29]

However if you want to retain and use the signalk icon in the task bar and make it open Firefox you can do this:

Start>Preferences>Main Menu Editor
In the LH panel select Openplotter
In the RH panel select SignalK
Clickl Properties
Delete the text in the Command box and replace it with:

Code:

/usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr  http://localhost:3000

Thanks baltika_no_9, that's the part I was missing.

---

Thanks for your feedback PaddyB. Yes, it is probably easier to access OpenPlotter web applications from another device.
But it's too bad that a basic app like Chromium doesn't work properly.

It is frustrating yes,I'm on a Pi 3 as well and most of the time I'm in signalk so use the laptop, getting chromium in the Pi when using a monitor is not rapid thing. 
I've never had a good time using a 8Gb card, 32Gb SD card I use now and up the swap file size, how to do that is on the web somewhere. 

If this is your first time it would be really interesting in a little while to hear how you got on with signalk, that's an active project and they are always interested in how to make things better or fix anything which is broken. Specifically the interface, be great to hear about anything which didn't make sense or wasn't very obvious.

PaddyB, in fact, I have 8GB RAM, but a 64GB SD card .

I tried the script proposed in this post, but even after adapting it to work, Chromium isn't faster.
I'll do without it for now.

About Signal K, I find this project really interesting and exciting for the capabilities it offers.
I managed to connect a BME280 component to get temperature, humidity and pressure. I plan to install InfluxDB and Grafana (because I already know Grafana for my work and I like it), in order to store this data, and diplay historical graphs.
For now, I've only had one problem with Signal K, when trying to update it via the webapp : I got the following error (in french, sorry !) :
Feb 04 10:14:31 POST /skServer/appstore/install/signalk-server/2.5.0 200 988.768 ms - 28
Feb 04 10:14:31 stderr: sudo: un terminal est requis pour lire le mot de passe; utilisez soit l'option -S pour lire depuis l'entrée standard ou configurez un outil askpass de demande de mot de passe sudo: il est nécessaire de saisir un mot de passe

I worked around the problem by enabling "Passwordless Sudo" mode :
I had to add the following line in /etc/sudoers file :
pi ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

[SVKitten]

I understand that without a monitor connected, OpenGL doesn't work on the Pi.  Chromium and OpenCPN need these to perform at all well.  Unfortunately, OpenCPN seems to forget the setting to disable OpenGL so that isn't great.

A good solution that works for me is to add the statement video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080@60D to the end of the file cmdline.txt

Let me know if it works for you.

[MarineW29]

I understand that without a monitor connected, OpenGL doesn't work on the Pi.  Chromium and OpenCPN need these to perform at all well.  Unfortunately, OpenCPN seems to forget the setting to disable OpenGL so that isn't great.

A good solution that works for me is to add the statement video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080@60D to the end of the file cmdline.txt

Let me know if it works for you.

Hi SVKitten,
I added this statement at the end of the only existing line in /boot/cmdline.txt file, and after reboot, it works ! Chromium is much faster !
Thank you so much.