Mozilla eats my processor

[maulerw]

hey all,
ive had firefox for awhile and no problems. (way better then IE )

anyway, it seems to be becoming more hungry. it started off me not even noticing to now it is consistantly using in the 90%+ range of my 3.5 ghz processor. right now, with this page only, it is using 90+ processor and 57 mb of ram. while the ram usage seems alittle high it doesnt matter, but when my songs im playing start pausing for a considerable amount of time when ive got more then a couple of tabs open... well.
the thing is i cant figure what is causing it to use this much. my net activity as i am typing is near on zero. and all firefox is doing is sitting there. it doesnt allways do this, sometimes it is normal. but not usually
i am using bit defender profesional plus. for firewall and virus scanning (updated) and spybot search & destroy for addware and the such.

if anyone has any clues to this i would be very thankfull.
thanks
alex

[rsmg]

I've been troubled by memory-hungriness and, worse, unclean exits leaving a Firefox process gobbling up most of my RAM after closing all instances of Firefox. Tired of using Task Mgr. to free up my computer.

This goes way back, to at least six months ago and I keep the latest running at all times.

Rob

[old FatJohn]

Usually this is related to a plugin. Java is the most likely candidate. I hear flash comes as a good second.

[maulerw]

while i have java, i have no other plugins for firefox, that, and it was not running at the time. also, unless java is now some hax beast that evolved over night. i am thinking it would not be the culperate.
as soon as i quit firefox. (that would be. rage/quit) processor usage goes straight to 3-8%. right now, for instance, firefox is beign a good little browser. but sometimes (and for no apparent reason) it hulkerises and becomes a process hungry beast bent on cpu domination. so go figure

[VanillaMozilla]

Well, it's either an extension, theme, or plugin. That's it. There really isn't anything else that does that. JavaScript (JS is not Java) does that on poorly coded Web sites, but it stops as soon as you close the site. Flash is a very likely culprit, even if you think you don't have it. (It doesn't go away easily.)

Safe mode will disable extensions temporarily. See if that helps. If that doesn't, create a new profile and see if that does it. (You can copy your bookmarks, passwords, etc. into the new profile). See my signature for details. If you have to look for plugins, open a page by typing about:plugins into the URL address box. You'll see them all listed. Let us know what you have. You almost certainly do have some.

[rsmg]

Thanks, Vanilla. Will print those instx. for next time. With the success of FF/TB, you get us regular folks who barely know an extension from a plug-in...

[VanillaMozilla]

To tell you the truth, I have <i>never</i> had to troubleshoot Firefox on any of my computers, so I barely know either (and I've been using it almost exclusively since version 0.7).

[tds777]

I've been using Firefox for several years on my computers, but after the last update it takes my AMD 3500CPU up to 100% with 1GB of ram and uses more ram than any other process I have running, though it still has 60% of ram resources left. Does any one have any ideas? I even disabled BD10 Internet Security and Spyware Dr to see if they were causing the problem still takes my CPU usage up to 100% while starting up and going to new tabs or loading pages and upon exiting. I now have to use IE browser and I use consider it the old clunker.

[VanillaMozilla]

Does any one have any ideas?

Yes.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 50#2775050

[satyr]

What about lowering the process priority to "below normal" or "idle"??! At least this would help with side effects ...


satyr

[satyr]

Oh and I totally forgot; I've created a thread about this issue (i.e. about flash banners in particular causing high CPU usage in Firefox) on Ars Technica forum that I've entitled "Flash banners causing high CPU usage in Firefox", while additionally also see this post of mine (my nick is "shirker") and responses of a user with nick "Magus`" in a thread titled "The future of web design" where we discussed the very same thing/problem.


/edited: a minor "one letter" fix


satyr

[VanillaMozilla]

That's the Flash plugin. It's not Firefox. Plugins are separate code, written by someone else, and Firefox can't control with they do. If a Web site wants to sit there and hog your whole CPU, Flash will let it, and Firefox gets the blame. (If Flash consistently worked OK for the same site with Opera, which uses the same Flash plugin, then that would be a Firefox bug.)

There's a separate issue for many sites: JavaScript. JavaScript on Web sites can also waste processor time doing nothing but displaying a banner ad.

When you close the bad sites, CPU use should return to normal. Bug Maulerw is describing a different problem (I think), because CPU use does not return to normal. Correct?

[tds777]

I’ve found the problem, in my Documents and Settings Folder in Application Folder in Data\ Mozilla\ Firefox \Profiles\ jeq45n0t.default were over 900 cookie text document from ???
This is the heading of huge text = 90kb+ of each of the 900 text files, they dated clear back to Aug 06
# HTTP Cookie File # http://www.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html# This is a generated file! Do not edit.# To delete cookies, use the Cookie Manager.
Once I sent about half to the recycle bin Firefox started zipping along. I’ve deleted all but around 25 now and Firefox doesn’t use hardly any CPU resources except when I first start it, once its running it does even hardly ever bump resources past 0- 30%. Before I done this it was taking up to 100% and holding then only dropping down to about 60% after web page finally loaded, then it would shot back up when I exited. Did Firefox generate these files or another program?

[tds777]

I wasn't try to make a link in my last post, it didn't happen till after I submitted it