Firefox Spikes

[TaoPhoenix]

For X amount of time now, I've been noticing random stalls on web activities. Lately I started putting Task Manager on, and basically every web action I do spikes the CPU. Just typing in this box does it, but the signature annoying one is scrolling pages. Basically any page I scroll shoots the CPU to some 40-90%.

What is that all about? I do know I have a sub derivative of Firefox, (originally chosen to stop a different delay recovering resources when I closed the browser) but it's like it has gotten worse lately. Anyone know if that is at all familiar to Firefox, or am I back to being the Resident Pest with an somewhat non-standard system that messes up people's diagnostics?

Anyone know of something like a hand-optimized variant of Firefox designed for pure speed?

Edit: It's almost like it's a rendering problem, moving windows around does it too.

[4wd]

Palemoon

A custom-built and optimized Firefox-based browser for Windows. Make sure to get the most speed and efficiency out of your browser!

About the only Windows Firefox based derivative I know of.

What version of Firefox are you using and is GPU acceleration turned on?

[TaoPhoenix]

I tried PaleMoon, X time ago it gave me a problem (either at home or at work, I now no longer recall.)

I ended up on Cometbird.

I WAS on "Hardware Accelertion", I vaguely recall that kind of thing causing fatal crashes at work, but maybe never considered the home angle ... stand by while I reboot Cometbird...

"Hardware Acceleration" is now off, and the smooth scrolling/auto scrolling are also off, I did a full defrag, and rebooted, and things seem to be a fair bit better.

[f0dder]

You might also want to VACUUM the various SQLite databases firefox uses for things like the awesomebar and such - while defragmenting the files on your filesystem is definitely nice, the files can suffer from internal fragmentation as well.

Personally, I have all my firefox profile stuff on a ramdisk, which (among other things) is backed up with Genie Timeline.

[dantheman]

Firemin might be of help to you.

http://www.datum-forensics.com/2012/05/firemin/

[f0dder]

Firemin might be of help to you.
http://www.datum-forensics.com/2012/05/firemin/

Almost as stupid as those "memory optimizers" - at least it uses SetProcessWorkingSetSize instead of huge memory allocations, and it only targets firefox... but it's still stupid. It's symptomatic treatment rather than fixing the errors - and it will very likely result in increased pagefile swapping.

Also, there's no date on the download site, so there's no way to tell which version of firefox was around when this application was written. A lot has happened wrt. firefox memory consumption in the later versions, so much that it's now mostly addons that leak. So you're better off figuring out which crappy addons you use, rather than using something like this.

[dantheman]

How can you tell which addons are causing memory leaks?
I've read here and there that Adblock Plus is a major culprit.
But, to be honest with you, i don't really notice any leaks.

Did notice that CPU was at max when watching a live video stream but that's another story...

[Burn-IT]

I've noticed - as I'm sure other have - that the latest Flash is not FF friendly on my machine It stays active even when not in use.
I've gone back to an older version.

[dantheman]

In the same line of thought, i've been using RAMback on Aurora and it seems to be doing a fine job.

[TaoPhoenix]

Hmm, the spikes are back so the stuff I did earlier wasn't a real fix.

[4wd]

And if you try running Firefox/Cometbird in Safe mode, (ie. all add-ons/plugins disabled) ?

Does it do it when in Private Browsing mode ?

Have you checked the Eventlog for any problems and/or run the Resource Monitor to see what's happening at the time ?

[Burn-IT]

Use Sysinternals Process Explorer to show what is running. It is a lot more informative than Task Manager.
Sysinternals is Microsoft owned and create all the tools that should have been in Windows; nearly all stand alone.
Nirsoft is another useful site that is well regarded for useful stand alone tools as well as a very few installable ones.

[f0dder]

How can you tell which addons are causing memory leaks?

To be honest, I don't know if there's a way to tell yourself - "about:memory" has a decent amount of information on memory allocations, but even in FF14 it doesn't directly list extensions. So it's more a matter of looking out for well-known memory hogs, and trying to minimize the addons to the ones you really use.

I've read here and there that Adblock Plus is a major culprit.

And FireBug has been known to be really bad as well. If you have some addons you only use periodically, you can create a separate FireFox profile for those, and keep them out of your main profile.

Did notice that CPU was at max when watching a live video stream but that's another story...

Streaming tends to imply flash, and flash is übersuck :-)

[TaoPhoenix]

And if you try running Firefox/Cometbird in Safe mode, (ie. all add-ons/plugins disabled) ?

Does it do it when in Private Browsing mode ?

Have you checked the Eventlog for any problems and/or run the Resource Monitor to see what's happening at the time ?

Some good tips you guys, let's see:

AdBlock isn't it. After my previous post on a general purge, I also just decided to try a reinstall. I had only been using Cometbird because of a random 10 second delay after closing regular Firefox about versions 9-12. But per my post, a 0.75 second delay for almost EVERY ACTION became a little much to take, so I just nuked it and redid Firefox 14. Surprise! Something they did fixed the problem (combined with my purges?). So the result is I am back on a Vanilla Firefox with no special tweaks, which is sorta where I wanna be these days. I'm getting too old and tired to super-tweak every instance for my freaky setups.

Not sure what all that means, though I lost the page, something On Wikipedia said they fixed something about hangups, so maybe it wasn't just me.

[anandcoral]

No you are not alone TaoPhoenix, I too was facing this problem suddenly and after trying whatever I could, I just made backup of my extension list and bookmarks, I uninstalled FF fully and re-installed fresh from the latest FF installer.

Well it fixed the spike problem and I have since loaded few must extensions. Still working more or less without major problem.

I read this thread after I have done the clean up so did not replied as I felt that this was the extreme measure to take.

It looks like some extension or tweak was causing the spike in FF14. Till next time, all's well now.

Regards,

Anand