Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle. The Amazon performance problem seems to be fixed. After months of muttering to myself about the problems with Amazon, it appears to be fixed. RIght now I have a half dozen Amazon tabs open in my Firefox browser (on a well equipped desktop PC with Debian) and performance is good. At the same time, I notice that when I hover my mouse over the "My Cart" icon, upper right of most pages, I no longer see a list magically appear of what I have in my shopping cart. I have to click on the Cart to go there. This may well be the sort of reasonable tradeoff that was required to get adequate performance - tune down the glitz a little.

I only have this problem with Amazon. I often have a hundred tabs open on various sites, all of which runs and fits fine on my overclocked CPU and 16 GBytes of RAM. But if I open more than one or two Amazon tabs, even if that's all I have open, life slows to a crawl and my Firefox CPU usage goes to 101% of one CPU core. It has been this way for many months with Amazon, across multiple machines and after clean installations on brand new disks of Ubuntu, Debian and Windows. Amazon is trying to do too much active updating on each page, or some such. The best recommendations I've seen from them are to clear my cache. Does a fresh install onto a new blank Samsung Pro 850 SSD count as clearing cache ? Using other browsers might allow -other- tabs than Amazon to proceed with less blockage, if those other browsers have better multi-threading support, but the Amazon site remains slow if I have more than one Amazon tab open, whether on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, or Chrome. Earth to Amazon ... we have a problem down here in Houston.

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