Foxglove Studio takes too long to start

[swarajpeppermint]

Description
Since a few releases ago, Foxglove Studio takes too long to start up (white screen to home screen). Attaching a screen recording of the delay. During the screen recording, I just have the browser running on the system.

• Version: 1.82.0
• Platform: Ubuntu 22.04.3
• System Specs: RAM 16.0 GB, Processor 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-11800H @ 2.30GHz × 16
• Data source (e.g. bag file, mcap file, rosbridge, ROS 1/2 native): N/A

Steps To Reproduce
Start Foxglove Studio on an updated Ubuntu 22.04 system

Screen Recording
Screencast from 12-19-2023 09:43:18 AM.webm

Expected Behavior
Should show home screen within a second or two

[foxhubber[bot]]

Internal tracking ticket: FG-6142

[jtbandes]

Can you press ctrl+shift+i when the window appears and see if there is any information in the developer console or network tab?

[swarajpeppermint]

[swarajpeppermint]

Foxglove Studio started hanging after a while

[swarajpeppermint]

network tab

[wimagguc]

@swarajpeppermint sorry about the long wait, but we're looking into this at last. Unfortunately I'm having a hard time replicating the issue you described here — on my setup 1.72, 1.82 and 1.87 all seem to cold-start within about the same time.

I also see in your console logs that a survey script wasn't loaded, and I wonder whether this has been a rather intermittent issue where a 3rd party integration slowed us down. Do you still see the issue on your end with the latest app releases?

[wimagguc]

Another question @swarajpeppermint: do you have any extensions installed? (Probably under ~/.foxglove-studio/extensions or wherever snap has those.) Thanks for the question @achim-k

[playerdefault]

@wimagguc Yes there are 2 custom extensions installed. (@swarajpeppermint is my other username) They are:

• https://github.com/playerdefault/foxglove-pointstamped-viz
• danielclapp.ros2-parameter-extension-0.0.1

[playerdefault]

A good update on this. Launching foxglove studio via foxglove-studio --disable-gpu --disable-software-rasterizer launches it instantly. The same issue is happening with VSCode too.
Relevant GitHub issue with VSCode: microsoft/vscode#192493 (comment)

Maybe it's not an issue with FoxGlove but something to do with a recent update with Electron?

[defunctzombie]

Folks experiencing this issue - did you install via Snap or Deb?

[playerdefault]

Folks experiencing this issue - did you install via Snap or Deb?

snap

[defunctzombie]

@playerdefault if you are still experiencing this with the snap install - could you give the Deb install a try and see if it exhibits the same behavior on your machine. That would be a helpful data point for us.

[playerdefault]

@playerdefault if you are still experiencing this with the snap install - could you give the Deb install a try and see if it exhibits the same behavior on your machine. That would be a helpful data point for us.

issue is not occurring with the deb version

[defunctzombie]

Anyone experiencing this I recommend using the deb version. I suspect the snap version has some delays loading the app code related to how snap wants to launch files in the sandbox environment.