Wayland-Proxy Load Balancer Helping Firefox Cope With Wayland Issues

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wayland-Proxy Load Balancer Helping Firefox Cope With Wayland Issues

With this week's release of Firefox 121, Wayland is being used by default when encountering a native Wayland desktop. Shipping as part of Firefox 121 is wayland-proxy as a C++ module to serve as a Wayland proxy load balancer...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-Proxy-Firefox

[waxhead]

While I admit to not being too familiar with Wayland yet this scares me:

"It prevents Wayland client to be disconnected by Wayland compositor if Wayland client is bussy or under heavy load."

And it is not the typo (bussy) that scares me, it is the fact that the design of the Wayland protocol apparently is so that if the machine hangs for a little while chewing along on something the client can be disconnected from the compositor... and crash / quit???! (is this what happens?)

I was under the impression that Wayland allowed clients to disconnect/connect to the compositor and could handle the compositor restarting, picking up the states from the clients without much issue , but apparently this does not seem to be the case. Why else would you need a proxy?!

Maybe someone with actual knowledge could share a bit about why this is even needed?

[cynic]

While I admit to not being too familiar with Wayland yet this scares me:

"It prevents Wayland client to be disconnected by Wayland compositor if Wayland client is bussy or under heavy load."

And it is not the typo (bussy) that scares me, it is the fact that the design of the Wayland protocol apparently is so that if the machine hangs for a little while chewing along on something the client can be disconnected from the compositor... and crash / quit???! (is this what happens?)

I was under the impression that Wayland allowed clients to disconnect/connect to the compositor and could handle the compositor restarting, picking up the states from the clients without much issue , but apparently this does not seem to be the case. Why else would you need a proxy?!

Maybe someone with actual knowledge could share a bit about why this is even needed?

I think this, from the linked article answer your question:

"Mutter (and maybe other ones) terminates Wayland client if it’s recognized as stalled. It usually means Wayland client doesn’t read messages from Wayland display socket fast enough and compositor message output buffer is full. It may be a bug in application itself (an event loop is not processed) or it’s caused by input devices like 1000 Hz mouse which generates too many events.

Unfortunately Wayland protocol doesn’t implement any kind of display connection management. Once the connection is lost / disconnected, there isn’t any way how it can be restored and Wayland client is terminated. The most visible example is Wayland compositor crash which takes down all applications, there isn’t any recovery point available.
"

[RealNC]

So much for the "superiority" of Wayland over X11.

No, thank you.

[bug77]

Wayland proxy load balancer

So much wrong in so few words.
Basically what waxhead said.

[Quackdoc]

I've always hated the fact that this is necessary, it's been an issue for a long time. This can actually happen when the PC is under load (thank god EEVDF fixed a lot of these issues). This is actually common.

I run paru update on one terminal tab and swap to the other, periodically check in on it, I use my PC while updating, all of the sudden my PC starts slowing down, becoming less responsive, "Oh no, rust program is compiling now" (for those who haven't had the displeasure of this, cargo will happly parallelize itself across every thread you have unless you configure it not to, while this sounds great, cargo is a hungry bastard and will eat all your CPU time)

Queue OH shit moment as every wayland compositor becomes less and less responsive under load, now compositor slows down, other applications slow down, Queue every gui app in existence spamming you with "Lost connection to Wayland compositor" or " The Wayland connection broke. Did the Wayland compositor die?" The solution? don't let your PC go under max load that actually pins every single thread you have or hit a ram constraint.

thankfully with EEVDF, whatever blackmagic it is, I no longer actually run into this issue. And no. this is not unique to gnome, or to KDE, or to sway. this is a core wayland issue, the messages will build up and just off itself. I and many other have had similar issues with firefox, gimp, kde sway it doesn't matter

[JEBjames]

Michael

typo

"Coming up to fr dealing with it is to have a proxy"

I'm not sure what is meant here. Maybe "Firefox's way of dealing with it is to have a proxy" ?

[deltragon]

I have to say, I've been using KDE Plasma Wayland with Firefox Wayland for at least a year now, both on Kubuntu and Fedora, and I've never had issues with Firefox crashing. Sure, in the beginning there had been annoying issues with drag and drop and the like, but since 5.27 it's been smooth sailing.
This seems like a Gnome/Mutter specific issue to me.

[davidbepo]

Day 420 of wayland being broken by design

[pieman]

I have to say, I've been using KDE Plasma Wayland with Firefox Wayland for at least a year now, both on Kubuntu and Fedora, and I've never had issues with Firefox crashing. Sure, in the beginning there had been annoying issues with drag and drop and the like, but since 5.27 it's been smooth sailing.
This seems like a Gnome/Mutter specific issue to me.

its probably common for people running really bad, low end hardware. since it triggers from "to many events, a system under heavy, hardware can't keep up." if you have something decent or high end its probably not really common. i doubt someone with a 13900k and a 7900 xtx would run into this issue. you would really have to go out of your way to bring such a system to its knees.