No… I don’t use hibernation at all and FireFox still has these issues. Sure, Outlook sucks up some memory but a browser taking in 200MB+ of RAM is unheard of.

Have you tried SeaMonkey 1.1? While Firefox is _the_ brand in the world of browsers it may be useful to see if the same problem reoccurs in SeaMonkey.

There is one situation when I’ve experienced similar problems with Firefox eating up all the CPU resources. It occurs if reading a PDF file inside the browser and then closing that page/tab (either by closing it or hitting ‘Back’). Acrobat asks something like “There are some more PDF documents open in the browser. Do you really want to exit” and after I hit “Yes” Firefox becomes unresponsive and remains like that until the ‘acrobat’ process is killed (in the task list).

oaf357 - yes this is disappointing.

CaptSolo - Right now I am using Opera with no problem. But I like your suggestion about trying Seamonkey.

Thanks to you both for your comments.

I have experienced the same problem… the firefox eated up all cpu memory.

I’ve struggled with this ever since moving to Firefox 2. I experimented with enabling/disabling extensions and other things… I recently downloaded NoScript extension. While playing around with it, I’ve realized that some javascript heavy sites like espn.com, and cnn.com have certain ad features that are the culprits in eating up heavy amounts of CPU. I can disable them with NoScript. This has for the most part resolved the issue. It comes down to suspect javascript on many sites, particularly those that are using advertising services.

Yes, Firefox is suddenly giving me the business. It’s been really bad for the past 2 weeks. (today is Feb 3, 2007) while trying to scroll a page or enter text in a form field it’ll just pause and not respond to anything for several seconds at a time. I’m trying to figure out what the problem is, or if anyone has discovered a fix, but no luck so far.

For me, it doesn’t seem related to any particular page or extension. One tab or many, the issue is right there, and FireFox is at the top of my CPU usage in the Pee Cee task manager.

No problem on the Macintosh though…

robbo,

I hear you. I just checked Firefox and it’s using a whopping 172 MB of memory.

Thanks for you comment. Hopefully the Mozilla team is working on a fix.

Regards, Ron

My wife has this problem in her computer too, with Windows XP. However, I never had any memory issue with Firefox 2 on Linux at work nor on my own desktop with Windows XP or Vista. I will check if there is any relation with the PDF plugin, she uses PDF a lot. The other difference is that I use AdBlock Plus, which may block bad ads with java as mentioned. I’ll try to investigate the trigger for this.

Hi joachim,

I use Adblock Plus as well. And like you, never a problem with Forefox2 in Linux.

If you come up with any solution, it would be appreciated.

Just checked Fox - 144MB.

Thanks for the comment.

i have exactly the same problem, with a couple of open tabs, firefox starts to eat CPU and RAM, and the system goes in a big lag!…im thinking of switching to Opera, anyother suggestions, guys?

Hello danish,

I’d give Opera a try. I have it installed and it works very well.

Thanks for the comment, Ron

I’ve been investigating this myself recently as it has been going on at home and at work for a few weeks now. I’ve heard a rumor that a recent update to the forcastfox extension causes this bug. I’ve disabled it at work now and so far everything is running perfectly!

Hello Mike,
Interesting. Thanks for the suggestion, since one of the extensions I am using is in fact Forecastfox. I just did a uninstall and I’ll see if that works.
Again, thanks for the comment. I’ll be reporting back and doing a post if in fact that is the culprit. Update: Uninstalled Forecastfox but still the same problem. Memory usage was still to high.
Regards, Ron

I’ve seen the same issue. I ran across this web site today: http://lifehacker.com/software/firefox-2/geek-to-live-top-firefox-2-config-tweaks-209941.php

In essence, it appears you can limit Firefox’s RAM use:

Goto about:config

Key: browser.cache.memory.capacity
Modified Value: Depends on your system’s total memory. According to Computerworld:

For RAM sizes between 512BM and 1GB, start with 15000. For RAM sizes between 128MB and 512M, try 5000.

Hello Dan,

Thanks for the link and comments. I just dropped mine down from the default of 65536 down to 15000 as a start. I’ll post back after I test this new setting.

Again, Thanks for the info. Ron

If I leave Firefox up all night w/out hibernation the next day at some point it will crash or freeze up, period.

The biggest problem I have is Yahoo mail, though. I cannot have Yahoo mail open with other sites in other tabs. If I deleted the mail in the bulk folder Firefox would shut down. So I avoided doing that. Then just deleting several from the inbox did it. I use the reporting tool. This has been happening since 2.0 came out. I would of thought it would of been fixed by now.

Yesterday I experimented. I had Yahoo mail in its own Firefox window. I opened a second Firefox to use for my other internet activities. It was the first day that Firefox did not end suddenly when I used Yahoo mail.

I do not want to use IE unless I am required to by the website (some job sites will only work with IE).

I found fix for Yahoo! mail issue thanks to your article and comments. Many thanks!

Yahoo! Application State
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes#Yahoo.21_Application_State

If you have installed Yahoo! Messenger on your system, you may experience crashes when using Yahoo! Mail. This is caused by the Yahoo! Application State plugin (bug 322363, bug 326344). To see if this is the cause of your problems:

Type about:plugins in the Location Bar and press Enter. If you find “Yahoo! Application State” (”npYState.dll”) in the installed plugins list, exit Firefox, open the C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\shared folder and rename the file “npYState.dll” to “XnpYState.dll” to disable the plugin. Open Firefox and test Yahoo! Mail.

Hi Dan,
Well I ran Firefox all day and night yesterday using the lower cache settings. I did notice that a decrease in the memory usage from of high of over 150MB down to about 83MB, which is a definite improvement. BUT that is still to high considering I only had one instance of Firefox open with only 4 tabs. And in talking with other colleagues who have tried this change, results have been mixed. I think that the folks at Mozilla are aware of the situation and hopefully the next version of Firefox will correct what appears to be a memory release proble,

Hello LadyCash,

And thanks so much for you comments. Hopefully this will help those who are using Yahoo’s Messenger causing crashed in Firefox. Thanks for the tip.

All the best to you both and thank you for sharing your suggestions.

PS I’m leaving the cache settings at 15000 for awhile, since on my system it does appear to help some.

Ron

Here’s your fix. Kinda’. monitor performence in task manager. When it gets to high for you just minimize and check results.
http://engtech.wordpress.com/2006/12/02/how-to-fix-the-firefox-memory-leak-firefox-hack/

One more thing. #4 on the page in previous post is what worked for me.http://engtech.wordpress.com/2006/12/02/how-to-fix-the-firefox-memory-leak-firefox-hack/

Hello Wayne,

Thanks for the suggestions and link.

Regards, Ron

i have 256 ram . Pentiun 4. And firefox 2 was eating all cpu memory. Pages froze.
I decided to go back to firefox 106 and all was ok.very often updates of good programs just screw them.

Hi Peter,
Thanks for your comments.

Hi,
I had the similar program with IE6. I thought it was related to IE so I switched to firefox and the result is the same:
If I load a few webpages with full of flashes my system is almost stopping cpu running at 99%.
I think it should be an issue with flash9b.ocx….

sasa

Hi sasa,

Thanks for the comments. Firefox is blaming some of the plug-in, extensions as being the culprits. Hopefully this will be corrected in version 3.

Regards, Ron

I do see this problem consistently for past one year, even though my firfox version is 1.5.0.9.

I use hibernation heavily though I’m not sure this is actually related to hibernation. As I move back and forth between different networks (home and office/ wlan and lan) I see firefox sometimes starts hogging cpu (>95%). Closing a few firefox windows/tabs doesn’t help and I have to actually close the application to stabilize my system. I’m on a Win2k Pro.

Hi Soubhik,

I’ve tried other tricks I have found on the net, but still no joy. It seems that the only REAL solution is to close Firefox and reopen it and start again.

Thanks for your comments and observations.

Ron

More People are Experiencing Firefox Issues…

Not too long ago I mentioned all the problems I have been having with the latest incarnation of the (once great) web browser, Firefox. I have figured out that the issues aren’t plugins, add-ons, or themes but very poor memory management, in a nut…

Hi guys. Well I ran into the same problem with Firefox. While Opera might be the fastest browser, nothing comes close to the customizing power of Firefox. So instead of switching and losing the way firefox is customized, I did some searching and found this website to fix firefox. I’m trying it now if anyone has any luck with this then let me know. http://engtech.wordpress.com/2006/12/02/how-to-fix-the-firefox-memory-leak-firefox-hack

This also happens in Camino and dispite what another poster said it does happen on a mac.

the key seems to be how long the browser is up moreso than the number of windows. closing the browser and reopening (even if it reopens the SAME websites) release a ton of memory and the system becomes responsive again.

On a G4 1.5Gh powerbook with 1.25GB of ram either browser will consume 2/3 of the total memory in use and will suck up virtual memory like it’s going out of style. You can hear this via the hard drive activity if you open a window and leave it alone for a while. open some other windows and tabs in them and after a bit go back to the original window and listen for it to spin back in from virtual memory.

so it’s not only the real memory that gets hit hard but virtual memory also. my guess is that the leak occurs somewhere along that path.

aka-none,
Thanks for the information. I think that the problem with Firefox is universal and needs to be corrected by the Mozilla team.

Mine uses over 450 with more than 5 tabs being opened for more than 30 minutes. I guess you can say its a “stress test” that Firefox continually fails.

Hi Brandon,
That’s a lot of memory! Thanks for the comment.
Ron

I think a lot of thee comments are ridiculous, claiming that browsers should be running under 100 MB. I have been pushing FireFox, Mozilla, and SeaMonkey in the 100MB plus range for years and years now.

Recently, I got some new hardware with 2 GB or more of main memory. I have been doing a lot of web development, which means a lot of surfing. I would purposely leave FireFox open for days — generally it would last about 4 to 8 days of use before I would get tired of all the open windows and tabs and shut her down.

Are you ready? Well, I have gone well over 1 GB of memory allotted to FireFox. Plus, add to that Adobe Reader or Acrobat at 60 to 150 MB, and Thunderbird running over 100 MB sometimes, and I have seen the system do some crazy things. But my hardware is so fast and stable, I can just shut down the programs I think are leaky and watch the swap file usage go down to normal size. It’s fast and works great. In seconds, I can re-run Firefox and I am back to normal memory.

What I have noticed is that going over 500 MB is not always the greatest. Primarily it is those scripts, Flash animations, or Acrobat files that do the worst, I think. Adobe Reader will crash my browser more often than anything, so I tend to open PDFs by downloading them first. But when I look at my dual or quad-core CPU usage, I notice that after a few days of surfing, there are browser script users stealing my CPU cycles. I have seen 100% usage on a single core, which makes it 25% total on the quad core. It does slow things down trying to switch FireFox windows, etc. More often than not, more than one core is running a script or two after a few days - awful on my dual core laptop.

But overall, I have not had FireFox crash much at all since I started this in December 2006. When I have to kill a process, it’s usually Reader. Note: I am at 236 MB right this second, 0% CPU. It is not uncommon for me to open 10 windows with 20+ tabs each. I have three windows and 37 total tabs right now.

Hello Billy,
Thanks you for sharing your experiences with us. I appreciate your comments and observations.
Regards, Ron

ive been experiences the same problem for the last 2 weeks, ever since i reinstalled windowsdoes every one have this problem, and why does it only happen to certain computers

Hi Sean,
Not a clue. I guess the last hope we have is that Firefox 3.0 may correct the problem.
Ron

In searching for a solution to my problems I ran across this site and found the comments very similar to problems that have recently been driving me crazy.
I primarily use Netscape (latest version) on XP Pro (latest update), AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 2GB mem. I generally have several pages active such as Foxnews (which updates periodically). I leave the system run 24×7 and notice that the PF Usage slowly climbs to well over 1000MB. At some point the system becomes almost unusable. If I close Netscape, PF Usage drops below 400MB and everything starts performing well again.
An additional problem occurs when I start an audio streaming site. It will run fine for a while and then CPS usage jumps to 100%, the audio starts a 10-30 second loop, and everything else comes to a halt. After 30 seconds, the sound bite advances and again loops. This process keeps repeating for 2-10 minutes and then CPU usage suddenly drops to normal and everything becomes functional. This problem may occur evey 15 minutes.
I switched back to IE and exactly the same problem occurs. Can anybody point me to a solution?

Hello Tony,
1000MB than drops to 400MB. At 400MB what other programs are sucking up the resources? Sounds like you may be running Norton or McAfee suite of some type. Just a guess. I’d isolate what the offending programs are. Uninstall them or turn them off and see what happens.

Ron

Thanks, Ron.
In MSCONGFIG, I have shut down everything that I think that I can and still keep running. Zone Alarm is off, AVG is off. I have gone though each process listed ib Task Manager and verified tat they are needed. There are 29 items listed including System, System Idle 7 instances of svchost.
I ran Security Task Manager (Neuber) and don’t see anything that I think is a problem
After running overnight with 3 pages open - Foxnews, Drudge, and this one, memory usage (as reported in Task Manager) for just the netscape.exe process has slowly risen to 460MB and continues to rise. The CPU usage for netscape is generally 0 with an occasional 5-8%. It seems that netscape sucks up memory everytime something changes on a page. It may be advertising activity or real page content. But memory doesn’t get released.
Now I opened a streaming audio page. Netscape Memory usage has jumped to 478MB but CPU still 0-8%.

Tony

My firefox 2 has also been playing. using up all my cpu.
At first I thought it was itunes, as it slowed down to a dramatic hault when I went to switch songs.

having looked in taskmanager it is most definatley firefox.

It works fine most of the time, but slows down now and again. If I leave it for a bit it sorts itself out but still not good!

Hi John,
I think quite a few of us are experiencing similar symptoms. Mainly high mem usage. Maybe Firefox 3 will address these issues.
Thanks for the comment.
Ron

I was having the problem with Firefox pegging my CPU to 100%. Disabled all plugins and that didn’t help, I installed flash block and that didn’t help either. I deleted the cache, browser history, cookies, etc. and that didn’t help. This is on a 2 Ghz Core 2 Duo Notebook with 2 GB of RAM, no way should the CPU be pegged by a browser.

I finally just created a new user profile and started using that. Now it works properly again. All I can figure is that “something” in my old profile was corrupt and by taking that out of the equation I am back to happily using Firefox.

Well, this figures. I’m very into computer graphics, and I’m always listening to music and browsing the internet while rendering stuff. And while doing so, every 5mins or so, firefox hangs. At first I thought iTunes was the problem, because I set its piority to “high” to avoid issues like the “spoilt record” effect.
But the hangs are actually not in time with song changing, most of the time. So I went to check my task manager, and realized firefox is taking up 100+MB, while my rendering is only taking up 110MB, and sometimes suddenly goes up to 70%CPU, and I’m talking about 500k polygons and above. My other major memory consumers are iTunes(33MB), explorer.exe(29MB, windows is not too efficient?!) and Thunderbird (23MB). But who ever heard a browser taking up more than 50MB? I mean isn’t it just a piece of software designed to interpret HTML and javascript? I really hope it’ll be fixed in Firefox3, I also tried Opera, but found it much too cluttered for my liking, and is not too fast too.

I’ve had this problem last couple of days. Firefox 2.0 in Win2000. Based on what I read here, I checked the Firefox profile directory. There I found 27676 files named like (xxx to replace numbers) bookmarks-1xxx.html, cookies-2062.txt, prefs-286.js, sessionstore-9991.js,all of them empty with filesize 0 !?! Trying to delete these, made my explorer session take the 100% lead… well, after killing the explorer session and switching to CMD, I finally managed to get rid of these files. Best of all, Firefox is back to normal. CPU load problem fixed. I can continue to use Firefox.

Same problem here. After installing FF 2.0 I was having these problems. It caused my IE-cache (IE tab add-on) to overflow. I removed all folders in my content.IE5 folder and also deleted the index.dat via an secundairy account. I uninstalled IE7 and am currently using the hideous IE6. I thought I solved it but FF2.0 is still giving these peaks while I am filling in a form as such as this one (see pic here –> http://i64.photobucket.com/albums/h180/Toniezz/process.png).

Now I am thinking of removing all my add-ons, de-installing en re-instal FF2.0. Anybody solved the problem yet? Maybe over at Mozilla?

I have (/had) the same problem with Firefox 2.0. I switched back to 1.5.0.12 today. It works fine for me now. What a relief. Awaiting FF3.0 or some serious updates by Mozilla before I go up to FF2.0 again.

Thank you everybody for sharing your experiences. It’s always nice to see you’re not the only one with the problem ‘ey?

[OFFTOPIC]
@ Tony Pflum, Maybe your problems are being caused by a cache overflow problem. Sometimes when stopping the load of a webpage these files are dumped in your ‘Content.IE5′ folder (inside your ‘Temporary Internet Files’ folder). Also (online) installation files are dumped in there. These files aren’t deleted after clearing the cache the normal way (Tools | Internet Options | General tab | Settings | ‘Clear Cache’). At pcpitstop.com there are some solutions you can try to solve this problem http://pcpitstop.com/pcpitstop/IntIEOver…).

It did the trick for me a while back (I even had to delete the index.dat file) :thumbsup:

[/OFFTOPIC]

Hello qinjuehang, ulriks and Toniezz,

Thanks to all of you for your comments and sharing your thoughts with us. It is appreciated. In general I belive we are all hoping that Firefox 3.0solves a lot of these problems. Only time will tell.

Ron

Hi,

I’ve been having CPU usage problems with Firefox, mainly with Yahoo Mail.

It seems that if you are displaying a folder with a large number of e-mails in it, after a while the CPU usage shoots up.

So I moved most of my e-mails from my inbox to another folder.

Hi Den,
Thanks for the tip.
Regards, Ron

Thanks the yahoo mail thing worked just by renaming as it was nagging me for more than 1 month or so. Before firefox just closed down when scrolling into firefox but now its working fine.

Hi Neal,
Thanks for your comment.

Den,
Good call.

Ron

i think theres really a problem with firefox nowadays and like your observation it happened a few weeks ago…still looking for the PERMANENT solution since closing and re openning in m opinion is not the solution…just a work around…still looking….

Hi arkei,
Thanks for your comment.
Ron

Firefox routinely pegs the CPU to 100%. My laptop has a 2GHZ processor and 2GB of RAM yet Firefox will take 100% of the CPU even when sitting at the Google search page. It only happens occasionally, but it should really never happen at all.

Hi Mike,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Ron

I’ll offer further confirmation on deleting extraneous files from the profile folder. I cleared out (thousands!) of garbage files in the profile folder and it appears to be acting normally again.

Hi Jason Simmons,
Thanks for you comments, Ron

Boy, am I coming here late. I started getting curious/perplexed at the slowness and lethargy of my PC. XP sp 2, pent 4, 3.2 GHz, 1 G RAM, after closing Firefox after one of my long sessions. Today was the 2nd or 3rd time I opened process explorer to see that -though I’d closed FF- it was still running AND consuming about 50% CPU and huge amt of ‘committed charge.’ Killing the process restored my PC to good state. But why is this happening?

I have NoScript. I’ve just tweaked display properties http://support.microsoft.com/kb/263039 from a tip or two I’ve seen. I’ve just installed RAM def XT and am figuring it out (maybe; if I’m lucky?)

Will post any success story.

Hello TomPepsi,
Let us know how it works out.
Thanks, Ron

Update: Ram Def XT appears to be a winner, also I tried these Firefox tweaks at
http://internetducttape.com/2006/12/02/how-to-fix-the-firefox-memory-leak-firefox-hack/

My PC seems to be working much smoother, efficiently and my daughter’s too (tho her weak, slow, low totem pole processor makes it harder to see).

I just installed another gig of RAM in my PC, up to 2 G now. I was curious if Fox would eat up as much RAM as I could throw at it.

But all of this seems to have done quite a bit of good.

Hello TomPepsi,
Thanks for the info. and link.
Ron

Hi. Have been suffering from 100% plus CPU usgae for som time but did not realise it was FF whach I have run for about the same time. Why are FF not responding to this problem. Had no-one told them? Time to move back to IE or perhaps try opera.

Hi Henry-Root,
The next version of FF which is version 3 should hopefully correct this problem.
Ron

I’ve noticed this problem when viewing websites with a lot of images. It will load about half of the page’s images and get stuck on one of them. Firefox then doesn’t respond, cpu usage goes up to 100%, and explorer crashes, forcing me to reboot. It doesn’t seem to matter what browser either. I’ve had this happen with IE, Firefox and Opera.

Hello Erik,
Try cleaning out your browser cache and see what happens.
Ron

four years ago I migrated from IE to FF because microsoft was adding more and more useless features and the browser was getting ridiculously fat. Web Channels (does anyone remember that?), Active Desktop, integration with Operating System, all that crap pissed me off and I migrated for a much lighter browser.

time passed. Now whenever I’m tired of fighting against firefox and seeing my notebook struggle to swallow huge swap blocks of memory, I just close everything and open Internet Explorer. Yes, I lose all handy features I have with FF+extensions, but at least it’s dawn fast.

Right now for example I have 23 tabs open with FF, and the stupid little thing is using 610,280K of memory (!!). That’s 60% of my physical memory, and 26 megabytes per tab. Considering most of them are text articles with 500-600 kbytes max, that’s ridiculous. They can blame anyone they can, but the truth is that Firefox is a bloatware too now.

yeah, that’s sad, but bill must be laughing out loud now… :o(

ps: Ron, you don’t need to thank everyone in this forum. It just adds clutter to the thread, without adding any valalue.

I have just started getting this problem, but this only happens when i try to load a java-based online game the cpu usage just rockets. then when i close it its fine but ive never had problems loading up this game before and to my knowledge nothing has been changed.

This is driving me insane too, because firefox used to run about 30mb and now launch it and can literally sit and watch the ram increase. Right now its at 202,000k. What the hell. Seriously. I haven’t tried the fixes reccomended in this thread yet, but if someone wants to email me and discuss this please do, I don’t feel like enough people are trying to communicate using this technology. ekimdrachir2007@gmail.com

I’m getting exactly the same issue with SeaMonkey 1.1.4 on hibernation - but older versions of SeaMonkey didn’t cause the same problem, it seems to have come in in the last couple of versions.

Actually, I don’t use firefox. I just use Explorer and I had the same problem. It didn’t matter what was open or closed generally but I did notice when I used windows media player the little green box would eventually pop up showing CPU full.

Right after the startup I would check the Task manager and it would show CPU memory as full. This continued for about two months. It had never happened before. I tried all sorts ofthings. Being a computer novice I imagined someone had planted malware on my computer or hackers were infiltrating my computer. I was using the free version of Zone alarm and it was constantly going in an out as though it was possibly being disabled. So I switched to Commodo Firewall Pro which is also free but more highly rated than Zone Alarm. Not only did it NOT go in an out like Zone Alarm, but 24 hours after installation, when I decided to add the optional (free) Comodo BO clean which is for removing and preventing malware, while in the process of installation all of a sudden I noticed the little indicator for the Task Manager that had been consistenly solid green showing a full CPU, suddenly began to change. When I opened it the CPU memory usage had dropped dramatically. Since that time it bounces between 4% to a max of 75% never staying in the higher range for more than less than a second. I’m curious though, why would it bounce up and down like that shortly after startup and the computer is otherwise dormant?

:
I too have same problem.

This solution worked for me…
i reinstalled the latest version of Adobe Flash Player for Firefox, installer firefox 2.0.0.8 and now m not getting 100% processor usage, however, memory usage is still not tht low..

download link for adobe flash player is:

http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player.exe

after having a lot of firefox issues, i scrolled through the comments and i think the question of the profile was the one that helped me. I think i’d gotten spyware or something, because when i looked in my profile (docs and settings\ecoslor\application data\firefox\profiles\ for newbies), i found i had more than 8,000 bookmarks all of 0k and matching javascript files!!!

Now that i’ve deleted all of those, firefox is running a lot faster, and you’d better believe i’ve got the script blocker extension. but it is easy to check for this because they were all for the same day and time.

I first started using Firebird in 2003 before it became the Fox, I think that now that FireFox has gained a level of usage that allows it to be placed as probably the 2nd most used browser the people at Mozilla don’t care about either how much Memory it consumes or how much CPU time it squanders.
I have often seen it use 7-800K of my 1gb, and consistently in 90% of CPU, the only surefire fix I have found is to shut it down usually by force.

I am finding at the moment on WinDoze that Safari is possibly the leanest browser around, even gives up a good chunk of the memory it is/was using when you just minimise it. Has it’s own weird quirks but generally not bad.

Still find FireFox the best environment for web dev - particularly firebug. It’s a pity that all the improvements have made the initial feature ‘Tabbed Browsing’ close to unusable

For me clearing the hostperm.1 file (with rules as to which sites are allowed to load images and which are not) did the trick. Disabling phishing protection also helped a bit.

Well, after updating to 2.0.0.13 and after 3-4 hours of browsing, FireFox is using 336 Mb!! and CPU use is 98% !!

I have 1Gb RAM, but this is too much for a browser!

Extensions: DoanloadHelper, TabMix and LiveHTTPHeaders

Something is really wrong with FireFox, and it is unusable with these problems. It’s time to go back to IE

Hi Luis,
You may wish to wait until the final of Firefox 3 is released. Mozilla says this should be around June or so. I will use memory better and cpu cycles.

I have had FF 2.0.0.14 suck up to 90+% of the CPU (it jumps around from a low of around 30% up to that 90+%). Also, earlier today Gmail took forever to load.
For the record I am on a Mac using OS X.

I’ve been using FF betas, now at 5, with very few problems (crashes) and am highly impressed by its speed and low mem use. Most of my add ons don’t yet work but I mostly don’t miss them. Might give Beta5 a try.

Hi John O.

I did:
http://www.lockergnome.com/blade/2008/04/04/firefox-3-beta-5-it-just-keeps-getting-better/

Get your extensions working:

http://www.oxymoronical.com/web/firefox/nightly

my Firefox is constantly playing up. CPU usage shots up too around 50% for no apparent reason whilst memory is constantly above ~250mb. I keep hoping that one of the countless minor firefox updates (which seem to happen weekly) would fix it.

I can usually tell when it starts to go pete tong when it refuses to change tabs, or allow me to move the window around.

I can recommend Opera as a alternative, and it also has a fantastic mouse gesture system implemented.

Cannot really recommend going back to IE7, although I reserve judgement until IE8 comes around. I develop websites for a living and IE is something to be hated, generating hours & hours of additional development time just to account for all its little furbles.

The plugin NOSCRIPT seem to be indeed a rather good solution.

Merci beaucoup Jerome (5th comment)… Thanks for your light on this problem.

I went back to 0-10% after being in the dreadful 95%!!

so far firefox 3.0.1 stays at 99% all day long. reboot, restart, etc and it does not go away … so much for version 3 fixing the problem. anyone have any ideas?

Easy to fix.

I, like all of you had this issue. Trying all other suggestions would not fix this. I went searching for months about this, trying solution upon solution, about 20 of them! I finally gave up searching until one day I stumbled upon this little gem:

Navigate to: c:\documents and settings\your username\local settings\application data\mozilla\firefox\profiles\yourProfileName.Profile (whatever it is called)

and delete the files named “xpc.mfl” and “xul.mfl”. Restart Firefox (may need to reboot pc) and voila! Fixed. Oh I also disabled “tell me when a site I visit is suspected of phishing” in the options.

Apparently after a while, firefox corrupts these files, especially upon upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0 or later. I’m down to 20% cpu after it being 80%-100% for 3 months!

Thanks for the comments.

Hi Kay - thanks for the suggestion.

Go to your firefox tools. and disable SOOO many useless plug ins. that will freshen your firefox up a bunch

Cut to the chase: here’s my summary of all comments so far and my results at the very top:

My results from suggestions:
mem/cpu
206 92 19 tabs open before any fixing
203 uninstall add-ions or disable them
132 92 close and re-open
252 95 update firefox to 3.04 - figures
152 19-99 - varies, usually about 30 but periodically jumps to 99 for sec only: kay’s delete xpc and xul
130 00-03: install no script without even clicking any options yet!
no change : display properties to 16bit
no change: ram def xt installed. ran the program and remains low resources. may need options set
41 00 after running ram def xt two times and setting option to automatically fix if it hits 1/4 of ram use
all tests were don’t without doing anthing on firefox except reload the 19 tabs. Now while surfing I see my cpu is still usually 0 and memory usage ranges around 66. Thanks to all of you for great ideas. I hope some of you readers benefit from my summation. my comments are between brackets [here]

most userful posts by:
Billy Newsom
Tom Pepsi
Kay for relentless searching

Solutions suggested: easiest to hardest

close it and re-open it (mine changed from 207 to 107 doing this)
Go to your firefox tools. and disable SOOO many useless plug ins
install no script extention and disable javascript
install RAM def XT  http://www.majorgeeks.com/download2195.h…]
tweak display properties http://support.microsoft.com/kb/263039 [basically, update driver and # Move the Desktop Area slider or the Screen Area slider to the 800 x 600 pixels setting.
# In the Color Palette box or in the Colors box, click High Color (16 bit)]
firefox tweaks at http://internetducttape.com/2006/12/02/how-to-fix-the-firefox-memory-leak-firefox-hack/ [never tried these]
profile spyware? my profile (docs and settings\ecoslor\application data\firefox\profiles\ for newbies), i found i had more than 8,000 bookmarks all of 0k and matching javascript files!!! [no 0k files found, not sure how to identify a javascript file]
then use script blocker extension

For me clearing the hostperm.1 file (with rules as to which sites are allowed to load images and which are not) did the trick. Disabling phishing protection also helped a bit. [does not explain where this hostperm file is located for me to try this idea]

kays: Navigate to: c:\documents and settings\your username\local settings\application data\mozilla\firefox\profiles\yourProfileName.Profile (whatever it is called) and delete the files named “xpc.mfl” and “xul.mfl”. Restart Firefox (may need to reboot pc) and voila! Fixed. Oh I also disabled “tell me when a site I visit is suspected of phishing” in the options. [deleted files w/o restart, did not disable phising for safety]

workarounds but not necessarily solutions
disable forcastextention
limit memory: Goto about:config, Key: browser.cache.memory.capacity
minimize it in task manager
use older version
Lower memory for other task in task manager using : *** Security Task Manager (Neuber)***
alternatives:

seamonkey
opera
Firefox2 in linux

causes suggested:
hibernation , outlook and firefox close before hibernation
PDF’s open
yahoo mail - sol for this: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes#Yahoo.21_Application_State ype about:plugins in the Location Bar and press Enter. If you find “Yahoo! Application State” (”npYState.dll”) in the installed plugins list, exit Firefox, open the C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\shared folder and rename the file “npYState.dll” to “XnpYState.dll” to disable the plugin. Open Firefox and test Yahoo! Mail.

firefox says it’s due to plugins and extentions
loading some images

firefox corrupts some files, see Kay’s solution

Thanks James for the great advice. Hopefully it will help someone.

I have found a nice little trick that lowered my cpu usage from 99 to 1-16. If you are using firfox type in your browser bar about:config. scroll down and make sure that your browser.cache.memory.enable is true, then right click ang scroll down to new and the enteger. type in this, browser.cache.memory.capacity now it will ask you for some info. If you are using 256mb of ram you type in 4096, if you are using 512mb of ram then you type in 6144 or 8192. then presto! all you did is change the amount of memory that you allow firfox to use. I have had no prob. with my computer since……hope that helped out and hurray firefox

[...] Strange slowdown problem Firefox can be problematic. This link is an interesting one: http://www.lockergnome.com/blade/200…with-this-now/ Are you using Hibernation? Does Firefox ever get closed given the computer is on 24/7? [...]

I am a bit comp. ill. I would just like to know what firefox-bin is…why does it exist? Is there an equivalent with Safari?

Firefox-bin often uses +100% of my processor making my fans go crazy!

Word

I recently had a problem of Firefox causing 100% CPU usage. I eventually discovered that the cause was running FlashBlock and NoScript add-ons concurrently. I found out this information via the following mozillaZine page which lists problems caused by add-ons / extensions.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions

There are seemingly a lot of potential problems lurking here…

Hope this is helpful.

Occasionally cpu pegged at 99% while streaming audio (no video). Only solution I have is to close firefox and reopen.

Problem Solved!
Thanks go out to “chemist” at techsupportforum.com.

Your Java is out of date. Older versions have vulnerabilities that malware can use to infect your system.
Please follow these steps to remove older version Java components and update.

* Download the latest version of Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 and Save it to your Desktop.
* Scroll down to where it says Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 13 The Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) allows end-users to run Java applications.
* Click the Download button to the right.
* Select the Windows platform from the dropdown menu.
* Read the License Agreement and then check the box that says: I agree to the Java SE Runtime Environment 6 with JavaFX License Agreement
* Click Continue The page will refresh.
* Click on the link to download Windows Offline Installation and Save the file to your Desktop.
* Close any programs you may have running - especially your web browser.
* Go to Start(or My Computer) > Control Panel and double-click on Add or Remove Programs and remove all older versions of Java.
* Click (highlight) any item with Java Runtime Environment (JRE, J2SE, Java(TM) SE or Java(TM) 6) in the name.
* Click the Remove or Change/Remove button.
* Repeat as many times as necessary to remove each Java version.
* Reboot your computer once all Java components are removed.
* Then from your desktop double-click on jre-6u13-windows-i586-p.exe to install the newest version.

* After the install is complete, go back to your Control Panel(using Classic View) and click the Java icon. (looks like a coffee cup)
o On the General tab, under Temporary Internet Files, click the Settings button.
o Next, click on the Delete Files button.
o There are two options in the window to clear the cache - Leave BOTH Checked
+ Applications and Applets
+ Trace and Log Files
o Click OK on Delete Temporary Files Window.
Note: This deletes ALL the Downloaded Applications and Applets from the CACHE
o Click OK to leave the Temporary Files Window.
o Click OK to leave the Java Control Panel.
o Delete jre-6u13-windows-i586-p.exe from your desktop.

So many versions later, I still have issues with Firefox 3.0.10. I usually leave my browser open and have a habit of having atleast 10-20 tabs open.

Back in the day I never had a problem with this, but lately, CPU spikes are a big nuisance. I have no idea how to fix this.

This is a thread on Mozilla forums. It’s something I’d thought of and thankfully people are already lobbying for it.

I know it’s not Firefox’s fault for all these CPU spikes. More like one tab that causes an issue (different coding styles etc could introduce memleaks). All we need is to be able to identify that CPU sucking tab and kill it.. and we’re good to go.

Maybe you guys should mention it..
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=890085&p=6634895#p6634895