Firefox now hanging every few moments, then resuming

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NomadOfNorad
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Firefox now hanging every few moments, then resuming

Post by NomadOfNorad »

Today, Firefox suddenly started giving me a Not Responding frequently. I had made no changes recently, and it was working fine the night before, when I'd quit the browser and performed the usual shut down of my machine.

I have a LOT of tabs pinned. Or rather, I HAD a lot of tabs pinned. After one too many freeze-ups, I finally resorted to closing out of them all, and then spending time on a particular forum I was looking up something on... at which point the freeze-ups weren't manifesting anymore.

Before I lost patience with it, I had already tried launching FF in Safe Mode, and was still having freezes. I had then resorted to disabling all Extensions and all Plugins manually, and was still getting the momentary freezes After clearing out all the pinned tabs, and having a period with no freezes, I started reintroducing one by one all the tabs I'd had pinned, a few social media places, some web-forums, and whatnot. I was doing this under the theory that one page or another was itself introducing massive background activity on ts page that was bringing the whole browser to a standstill. After a number of tabs had been brought back up and pinned, I was still not encountering the freezes. When I reintroduced two Google+ accounts' pages, I started getting the momentary freezes again, so I dropped back out of those tabs and resumed adding back in more of the other tabs that I'd had. I ran into freezes again upon loading some from the last handful of bookmarked tabs. This seemed to implicate the web forum at highfidelity.io and my Youtube Subscriptions page, but I'm not really sure if it was both of those, just the first one.... or Firefox simply deciding I'd opened too many pinned tabs. oO

In any event, I had not made any changes since the time when it was all working fine, which makes me wonder if some auto-update to Firefox turned out to be very buggy in my case, or if some other auto-updated add-on to Firefox setup broke something.
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Reflective
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Re: Firefox now hanging every few moments, then resuming

Post by Reflective »

Troubleshooting Firefox not responding: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fi ... responding
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therube
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Re: Firefox now hanging every few moments, then resuming

Post by therube »

What version of FF?
How many is a LOT?
How much RAM is FF using at these times?
Fire 750, bring back 250.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19) Gecko/20110420 SeaMonkey/2.0.14 Pinball CopyURL+ FetchTextURL FlashGot NoScript
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NomadOfNorad
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Re: Firefox now hanging every few moments, then resuming

Post by NomadOfNorad »

Well, the version of FF I have is 53.0.2 (32-bit), which according to the About pane is up to date. As for how many tabs I have pinned, there are almost 30 of them. At the moment FF seems to be using about 2,780 MB of ram.

BTW, I adore therube's avatar! :D :D :D
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Happy112
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Re: Firefox now hanging every few moments, then resuming

Post by Happy112 »

Hi NomadOfNorad !

Are you using Multiprocess (e10s) ?

You can check whether you have this feature turned on as follows :

• '3-bar' menu button => ' ? ' button => Troubleshooting Information
• type 'about:support ' (without the commas) in the address bar and press Enter/Return
In the first table on the page, check the row for 'Multiprocess Windows' and see whether the number on the left side of the fraction is greater than zero.
If so, you are using e10s - otherwise it should read : 0/1 (Disabled).

If you are using e10s:
You could turn it off as follows :

Type in the address bar 'about:config' (without the commas)
(promise to be careful, if asked)
Type and search for the preferences :
browser.tabs.remote.autostart
and set it's value to false
browser.tabs.remote.autostart.2
and set it's value to false

Note: the exact name of the preference may vary, but it will start with browser.tabs.remote.autostart

P.S. : Your avatar is quite nice as well !
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therube
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Re: Firefox now hanging every few moments, then resuming

Post by therube »

2.8 GB of RAM is a lot (for a Mozilla browser), no matter how you shake it or what you throw at it.
64-bit version of FF may help, some.
Fire 750, bring back 250.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19) Gecko/20110420 SeaMonkey/2.0.14 Pinball CopyURL+ FetchTextURL FlashGot NoScript
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NomadOfNorad
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Re: Firefox now hanging every few moments, then resuming

Post by NomadOfNorad »

So, if I uninstall the 32bit version of Firefox, will it leave all my settings and stuff intact for the 64bit version to pick up and use?

edit: okay, found this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sw ... bit-64-bit

edit2: Okay, I've got the 64bit version installed and the 32bit version uninstalled, and will see how this goes.
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NomadOfNorad
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Re: Firefox now hanging every few moments, then resuming

Post by NomadOfNorad »

Okay, now that I'm on the 64bit version, I find its still doing the briefly-freezes-up thing. The freezy-uppy is shorter in duration, but its still happening every few seconds, and is causing it to ignore my mouseclicks on certain things half the time, or to fail to complete a command I try to invoke on it, such as "Open this page on that other browser." What happens is I'll get most of the way through selecting an option through one of the FF menus or panes, the browser freezes up for a brief moment... then forgets I was trying to invoke some particular action, so I have to do it again. Drag-and-drop of a shortcut to desktop also seems to be getting tripped up by this.

And right now, Task Manager shows it taking up 3,200 MB or so.
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dickvl
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Re: Firefox now hanging every few moments, then resuming

Post by dickvl »

Did you try a new profile?

See "Creating a profile":
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Standard_diag ... ile_issues

If the new profile works then you can transfer files from a previously used profile to the new profile.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_ ... _-_Firefox

You can also do a malware check.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tr ... ed-malware
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NomadOfNorad
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Re: Firefox now hanging every few moments, then resuming

Post by NomadOfNorad »

Well, this is patently weird. Now, many hours later, after leaving the Firefox window buried under a bunch of other windows (including both Chrome and Opera browsers) and getting involved with a buncha other stuff, I came back to it and... I don't see any sign of the repeated spasms of one-second freezes. About the only thing I DID do was save out a backup of my settings with FEBE some hours ago, then mentally placed FF into the I'll-deal-with-this-later list.

oO

Oo

**Goes and checks his water-faucets for gremlins...**

Oh yeah, and Task Manager now shows FF using about 1,400 MB.
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NomadOfNorad
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Re: Firefox now hanging every few moments, then resuming

Post by NomadOfNorad »

Annnnnnd today I come back and its returned to intermittent hanging again. oO

Too many fish to fry right now, I'll tackle this in a day or two.
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