About two years ago, I developed a kiosk application using QtWebEngine. At the time, I encountered the “socketpair not implemented yet” issue, which I worked around by launching the browser with the --single-process flag. While that workaround eliminated the error, it noticeably impacted performance.
Recently, I revisited the project to explore whether running it on one of the available GPUs could improve performance. This time, I used the Falkon browser project as a reference for restructuring and building the application. However, after disabling --single-process, I ran into the same “socketpair not implemented yet” issue again.
I would appreciate it if anyone familiar with this problem could share whether they’ve found a solution, or if perhaps I’ve misconfigured something in my environmen such as missing libraries or incorrect linkage.
Without the --single-process argument the Chromium engine tries to run different parts of the engine in different processes, which currently fails because of missing features like a working socketpair() implementation or shared memory across processes with mmap(). With --single-process, threads are used instead of processes and the libc pthread implementation distributes these to different CPUs if possible, so the performance difference should not be that much I’d guess.
Do you have an example web site which is noticeably slow and could be used as a test case for comparisons or debugging?
Your explanation aligns well with my understanding of WebEngine’s requirements that the lack of socketpair() and proper shared memory support is the main reason for failure in multi-process mode. I had already suspected this might be the cause, and now it makes more sense. It is a bit disappointing.
In my case, the system (which uses a Celeron processor) performs very well in general across various applications. However, the application I developed using WebEngine runs noticeably slow, even when browsing simple pages that are not particularly heavy or rendering-intensive. I initially thought this slowness could be solved by offloading more work to the GPU, but it seems I need to address the WebEngine-specific performance issues first before considering that.
For example, the website speedtest.net reports a network speed of 5 Mbps, but the page itself loads and refreshes very slowly. This clearly shows that the problem is not related to network speed, but rather that graphical rendering is not functioning efficiently. I’m not sure whether this is due to the weak CPU or an issue in my application.