Has anyone else noticed that browsing performance has dropped off a cliff with PR1.2? For some web pages at least.

Go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/ and click on one of the links at the top right, under the heading "other top stories".

As & after the page is loading, scroll around a bit.

My cpu is pegged. It feels like the whole system is swapping madly (it isn't, but it feels like it). Task switching is unresponsive or crawls. Xorg is taking 70-75% CPU, browserd is taking 20% or so. Disabling Javascript doesn't help.

This is a fresh flash of both FIASCO and eMMC for PR1.2.

I wonder if this is related to antialiasing or kerning as everything chills out a bit if I zoom in slightly.

Followed your suggestions and found no problem; it feels snappier than before the u/g to me.

I've noticed similar. MicroB seems to stall quite often and has fits of unresponsiveness even more than it used to.

Seems like a lot more swap is used than before, too. Maybe these two things are related.

Swapping willl always kill performance, as the CPU is busy pushing pages out to the eMMC which is rather slow.

I suggest using htop and sorting by MEM usage. See what's eating memory. Also, those BBC pages had the iPlayer on them, which loads Flash, which has always been a huge source of performance issues for me.

seems much quicker to me, flash still slows it right down but overall the browser is much zippier!

I thought it was a bit slow straight after my update but after a reboot everything went back to normal maybe even a bit faster

I didn't try the BBC site (not in UK so I can't use iplayer anyway). But I experience it even on flash-free sites like TMO. I get the familiar "Page has stopped responding, do you want to close the window?" Prompt constantly. It seems like almost every page shows me this at least a few times during loading. I believe it is still set to 15 seconds. I guess it can't load a page in 15 seconds. I should probably raise this value.

same here it was slow right after the update, apt-get clean + reboot brought the n900 upto speed.

What does that command actually do?

Yes, exactly -- same here. After the update, I found the system very unresponsive. Scrolling was jerky, Xournal was completely unusable, etc. However, after a complete reboot, everything's running smoothly again.