Ff4 uses 50-60% processor for animated GIF smileys

[Huusoku]

Hello mozillaZine,

System Info: Compal JHL90 Laptop, 32-bit Windows XP, Intel C2D T9900 @ 3.06 GHz, 4 GB RAM (limited to 3GB in XP), Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT graphics, upgraded to Ff4 from Ff3, only 1 user profile. Issues occurs regardless of coldboot or not.

At the topic post page of our company's forum, we have over 100 smileys that are loaded and displayed (similar to those at the right of this text box I am typing into). Most are just regular 15x15 GIF simleys, and about a third of them are animated, still on the small side; The largest ani GIF we have is 55x19.

Ff4 Issue:
In Ff4 (both 4.0.0 & 4.0.1), when all the smileys load up, their animation slows down and my processor goes up to 50-60% and my laptop fan kicks on. If I drag another window in front of Firefox hiding the smileys from view, then Ff4 drops to about 20-25% CPU.

Ff3 Experience:
I don't know what the CPU usage was under Ff3, but my laptop fan _never_ turned on with Ff3 viewing the same identical website (same forum software and everything else), and I used our company forum hourly so I would remember this for sure.

So I am just wondering if there is some issue going on that I can fix for this? An additional performance issue I had was when I first got Ff4 installed, simply scrolling down pages and selecting select boxes was very slow, nearly unuseable! So I did some research and added background-attachment: scroll !important; to my userContent.css file which completely fixed this issue straight-away. If the two are related I do not know.

Any suggestions welcomed! Thanks!!
Huusoku

[Huusoku]

Here is a list of my installed extensions:

Adblock Plus 1.3.6
Add to Search Bar 2.0
ColorZilla 2.5.5
Context Search 0.4.6
Download Manager Tweak 0.9.5
Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus 1.1.1
Firebug 1.7.0 (currently disabled)
Hide Navigation Bar 1.41
ImageBlock 2.1
Java Console 6.0.20
LastTab 3.0t3
LogMeIn,Inc. Remote Access Plugin 1.0.0.652
Menu Editor 1.2.7
NoScript 2.1.0.3
QuickDrag 2.1.3.21
Save Images 0.6.8
Screengrab 0.96.3
Speed Dial 0.9.5.8
Status-4-Evar 2011.04.06.18
Web Developer 1.1.9


While typing all this out, I realized I have not troubleshooted this issue in Ff safe mode. I will restart Ff4 right now in safe mode and see how it does. Please stand by...

[Huusoku]

Ok, in safe mode the processor drops just a bit to 48-52% and my laptop fan turns on.

Again, the fan never turned on while using Ff3.

Any thoughts anyone? Thanks!!
Huusoku

[rob64rock]

Ok, in safe mode the processor drops just a bit to 48-52% and my laptop fan turns on.

Again, the fan never turned on while using Ff3.

Any thoughts anyone? Thanks!!
Huusoku

Bug 595671 - Animated images (GIFs) cause severe performance issues
Bug 615063 - Pages with huge amount of animated gif images causes high CPU load
Bug 645761 - [Mac] High CPU usage when viewing animated GIFs

Some have said that disabling hardware accelerations helps:

If you filter about:config on "layers" you see two boolean prefs. Flip them
both, so that layers.accelerate-all is false and layers.accelerate-none is
true.

[Huusoku]

rob64rock,

Awesome, thank you very much for this information. Sorry I was not able to find this during my Google searches. I will perform the suggested modifications and report back!

Thanks
Huusoku

[Ruslan-ka]

For me help this: layers.prefer-opengl to true