Firefox 3 high CPU usage when loading pages

[markdr]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone here could help me...

I don't understand this, but FF3 has been great for me, until now. I've started noticing that whenever I'm loading two (or in some cases one) tab at the same time, CPU usage for Firefox goes through the roof, always more than 70% and sometimes high 90s. I noticed because it was causing music being played by Winamp to pause.

I have only 3 extensions, and I even tried FF in safe mode and CPU usage was much the same.

Has anyone got any advice here on what might be going wrong or what I could try, or is this typical? My computer is quite old but the CPU is fairly good. My internet connection, on the other hand, is pretty slow (50kbps max).

[wroot]

Give us more info:

Operating System (version)
PC technical info - CPU, RAM (exact values)
Add-ons you have installed (list all addons preferable with versions)

Is it happening with all pages or with particular ones? Then give us some examples to test with.

Can you try starting with fresh profile and test?

[hilbert]

I'm having the same problem. After installing SP3 on windows xp i noticed minute long pauses after opening a page, which I found out was because cpu was at 100% for that length of time. I followed some of the steps on this site http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/09/fix-ex ... isk-usage/ which have only reduced the amount of time -- that is, now my cpu will max out for only a few seconds, but this still seems way too excessive. Once the page is loaded all is fine, but every page will do this, even pages that have not changed since I last visited them. Even ie does not do this.

my add-on's are the latest versions of:
adblock plus
autofill forms
edit middle
greasemonkey (yes, I still have the problem when I disable this)
noscript
searchbox sync
searchwp
session manager
stop-or-reload button
update scanner
uppity
webmail notifier

installed but disabled:
zotero
snap links (incompatible with ff3)
realplayer browser record plugin (incompatible with ff3)
proximic (incompatible with ff3)
drag and drop zone (incompatible with ff3)
download statusbar
cookieculler
/find bar/

[wroot]

hillbert, have you tried starting in Safe mode or with fresh profile? Also you can try disabling Options > Security > both "Tell me.." and test with such setup. Do these pages you try to laod contain flash elements? Is www.google.com bahaves the same?

[Guest]

Google.com is admittedly better. There is a quick spike in cpu usage but not to 100% and it drops to normal after 2 seconds. Every other site takes me to full cpu usage for several seconds.

Safe mode is unbearable. It returns the browser to its original state before I made the "fixes" mentioned in the site from my previous post. In safemode my computer stalls for minutes as the cpu goes to 100%.

I disabled the "Tell me..." boxes before posting, along with several other fixes so I'm not sure which of them helped most, but none have fully resolved the problem.

[spudtu]

In the remote hope my "two bits" will pull some knowing soul out of the woodwork:

I have looked at posts going back 4 years (to FF 1.0) and this CPU problem is long-standing. No one seems to know any workaround. I say "workaround" because clearly there have been so many users with so many different PC configurations and usage patterns that it cannot be said that the CPU problem is due to someone with a "bad setting" or a "bad website." I.e. abandon all hope of finding what you might be doing "wrong", all ye who enter here. Hope only for some way to dodge the charging CPU beast.

Clues I've noticed, for what they're worth:
restarting FF temporarily cures
Closing certain webpages (Scottrade, iGoogle) does often help. These usually seem to be sites heavy on data flow, but not always. When I browse w/o these sorts of pages, and keep it down to 2 windows with 4 or 5 tabs each, even then FF excurses to 10-15% CPU and 250K+ mem use. That seems out of proportion. Without site restrictions and more tabs, frequent excursion to 100% and 300K+. Lockups are a 1-3x/daily occurance and it seems to get worse every week, which makes me think there is some progressive file corruption or something. Or that MS is sending me updates that corrupt FF.

I am surprised that no one in the open-source community with programming skills has taken on this problem with FF. I can only surmise there are some kind of politics involved. Somebody...give up your pride and admit there is a problem!

Having said that, pretty much everything else about FF is such a pioneering genius. Tabs, add-ons, everything that IE isn't. Or WASN'T until they woke up and smelled the scent of fox. (Doesn't that gall you? That MS can in any way, shape or form capitalize on the open-source labor, belatedly introducing their own tabbed browsing, etc? Isn't there some way open-source software can be patented, subject to the license (thou shalt not use this software in any commercial application)? Or better yet, such that anybody but MS can use its ideas?...Eay, lawyer types...? OK, I know, I 've got a serious anger issue with MS...but, hey, they so deserve it.

I'm drifting here, but, please, somebody, I am at a crossroads, ready to jump ship back to IE or Apache or whatevertheheck that other browser is.

P.S. To those who doubt my take on things, I will add to the long, long list of strategies that have been tried:

I have Flashblock installed
NoScript installed and used by default on every page
presence or absence of add-ons makes no difference
I have defragged and deleted cache and cookies and so forth until the cows came home
downloaded all available updates for FF and Windows
running WXP SP2 on a 2.8 Ghz P4 with 2gb RAM
run NAV (with auto definition updates), Spybot, Windows Defender regularly
1.5Mbps cable connection (no router)

[hilbert]

...just to distinguish my problem from the previous poster. This issue has only occurred since upgrading to FF3 for me.

[P8sj3]

spudtu: You have tried a new profile? http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles
I'll just comment that I have never seen high CPU usage that wasn't fixed by flashblock , noscript , and turning off animated gifs.

[spudtu]

Thanks for the suggestion P8. I'll try it in a day or two when I've recovered from my debugging attempts for the week. That's pretty interesting about your experience with flashblock, etc. I had high hopes when I installed those things. And they do, of course, help. But it seems the issue remains for me.

[pedro444]

I have a similar problem with FF3 with cpu & disk being thrashed for about a minute every fifteen minutes or so.
No add-on Extensions or themes used. Someone suggested changing "ulrclassifier.updatecachemax" from -1
to 104857600. I tried it & has largely made FF3 usable for me, I still get cpu hogs every now and again but they now only last for two seconds or so. I can tolerate that.
If you want to change it enter about:config in the FF URL bar and ENTER.
Scroll down to the entry "ulrclassifier.updatecachemax" and change its value from -1 to 104857600
Be careful not to go changing items randomly.

[spudtu]

Thanks for the tip, pedro. I did read about this somewhere else and then lost the link. But my config list doesn't have that entry. Anybody have any idea what registry entry it is or whatever?

[pedro444]

Changing "urlclassifier.updatecachemax" worked initially but since then the disk thrashing has got
steadily worse. Five days on and I am going to revert back to FF2 or even IE (well probably not IE)
This problem needs to go away or users will be leaving in droves.

[Kirk M]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone here could help me...

I don't understand this, but FF3 has been great for me, until now. I've started noticing that whenever I'm loading two (or in some cases one) tab at the same time, CPU usage for Firefox goes through the roof, always more than 70% and sometimes high 90s. I noticed because it was causing music being played by Winamp to pause.

I have only 3 extensions, and I even tried FF in safe mode and CPU usage was much the same.

Has anyone got any advice here on what might be going wrong or what I could try, or is this typical? My computer is quite old but the CPU is fairly good. My internet connection, on the other hand, is pretty slow (50kbps max).

I've posted here about this myself, filed a bug report and also found a fix for it:

Short version: Set browser.cache.memory.enable to False in about:config. Restart Firefox 3.0 and your problem should be gone.

Long version: Check out http://www.greenmtngeek.com/2008/06/firefox-3-rc1-high-cpu-use-try-this-fix/ (post is for Firefox 3.0 final but post slug is the same as original for RC1). Includes the full procedure and links to the bug report and forum post I started.

Hope this helps.

[pedro444]

I think you mean "browser.cache.memory.enable" and not "browser.memory.cache.enable"
I shall try it.

[Kirk M]

I think you mean "browser.cache.memory.enable" and not "browser.memory.cache.enable"
I shall try it.

Yup, that's what I mean (I corrected the error, thanks!). Should have copy and pasted it instead like I usually do just so that doesn't happen. Never could get the order straight with those things. It's always something isn't it?

Let me know how it works for you.