Mobile computing problem of the day
Well this could drain my productivity today. For no reason that I can think of, Firefox 3 has become very unstable: pegging the CPU and wildly swinging memory usage from 150MB to over 700 MB for no apparent reason. The browser can just sit there idle and yet the memory swing is up to a half-gig! I snapped the above shot after starting Firefox up along with three tabs, for example. The strange behavior started yesterday afternoon when I had to manually kill the firefox.exe process three consecutive times in less than a half hour due to no program response.
After a reboot this morning (my first in about a week), I was hoping the issue would disappear, but no luck so far. I haven’t installed any apps nor extensions, so no changes were made that I can think of. About the only change I knowingly did was to plug in a USB headset which did install a new device in Vista. I can’t see why that would do anything to Firefox, but I’ll be uninstalling my Plantronics headset just to see what happens. Oy!
Welcome to the cloud.
It could be some malware clinging onto Firefox and using it to run some program embeded within firefox i.e. flash.
Check the Reliability Monitor and see if there are any other crashes occurring at that same time. Also check your extensions. Run Firefox in safe mode and see if that helps.
Hmm… maybe blogging about the problem scared the app enough. It’s been fine since I posted about it. OK Firefox… I’m watching you!
well, this could very well be one obstacle in your cloud computing endeavors. think of it this way – ok, it’s a browser only work, but what if your browser goes bananas for some reason? then you’re left with nothing on your hands. on the other hand, if you had apps installed, you could still do some word processing. what’s your take?
It absolutely could be a show-stopper in a worst-case scenario. This is the challenge / risk that anyone embracing the cloud has to face while it’s still maturing.
All of your eggs in one basket. Since getting my MSI Wind, I have been using the cloud as much as possible. The cloud decided to have one of my apps go into unscheduled maintenance when I needed it for a meeting. I feel your pain Kevin. That app does have gears support, so I plan on getting that configured by the end of the day. I’ve said it before, having a local copy is always the safest bet.
Do you use iGoogle? I had a similar problem a while ago which seemed to come from that page. I reached 700Mb of ram usage and then closed the tab containing iGoogle. A second later I was down to the usual 100-120Mb usage.
Dunno exactly what caused it. I had the problem for a week or so and then it disappeared. I suspect it might have been one of the gMail, engaget, googlereader or digg apps that caused it, but I can’t confirm it.
I have had this problem as well. The only thing that seems to tip me off that FireFox is consuming lots of processor cycles is that my Toshiba Virtual sound system tray icon on my Libretto changes to tell me there is a sound environment change and reverts to the SRS. This seems to occur when I go to websites with embedded flash videos on the page. Even though it is not playing, it still seems to trigger it, thus my Libretto spools up. I have found offending sites to be Engadget and Gizmodo, 2 of my other favorite blog sites other than this one. In any case I end up having to close FireFox and re-open it, and all is good again.
This is a longshot but I see the same behaviour with FireFox shortly after logging into MobileMe to check my email.
I normally leave the MobileMe tab open to return now and then to check email; soon I notice that my laptop’s fan has kicked in and is building up steam; as soon as i close the MobileMe tab, the fans drops back to normal. I started using Safari to check MobileMe – even though I find it slower than FireFox when navigating the folders, etc.
Note: I do not close FireFox – just the MobileMe tab. I will try to reproduce the behaviour this afternoon and make a point of checking FireFox’s CPU and memory usage before closing the tab.
I’m glad yours stopped! Oh, I’m running the latest FireFox 3.01 general release.
do you usually clean cookies and temp files? do that before turning off features. or maybe you “caught” malware or something. after thoroughly cleaning temp files and cookies try again.
i’m running ff3 3.0.1, 3 instances with multiple tabs open. flash and other things running, extensions etc and right now 80MB used RAM…
FF3 has been sucking up CPU (sometimes as much as 97%) on my work desktop, my tablet, and my MacBook lately.
Kevin,
Are you still using Weave? Was it trying to sync during the time Firefox was sapping all that precious memory?
Me too, for the time being I have disabled Weave and so far all seems well again.
Thanks
I have been having the same problem with Firefox on Vista. It does seem to have been worse since I’ve been using MobileMe – I’ll check out whether that site has anything to do with it.
Hope all are well. Jon Dee