[ale] ff cpu usage jumps to 50% with all tabs minimized

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

On 3/11/2013 6:13 PM, Alex Carver wrote:
> On 3/11/2013 13:26, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been experiencing a strange problem and I thought I'd mention it
>> since others might be seeing it.  I'm using Firefox in Windows 7.  This
>> may apply to Linux too, but I don't know for sure.  I have 6 FF windows
>> open and maybe 80 tabs total.  When I MINIMIZE all the FF windows, the
>> cpu usage on my Pentium dual core system jumps to 55% or so and stays
>> there.  As soon as I display one of the FF windows, it goes back down to
>> its normal idle of around 10%.  Just a few minutes ago, I restarted FF
>> and allowed it to update from version 19.0 to 19.0.2.  This MAY have
>> solved the problem.  I haven't seen the CPU staying way up high since
>> then.  I'll follow up if I see it again, but I just wanted to see if
>> anyone else had noticed this.
>>
>
> I believe it's a garbage collection/cache issue.  FF attempts to cache 
> anything not visible to reduce its footprint in active memory (a 
> frequent complaint that it leaks).  When you minimized everything, you 
> probably saw the system dumping to cache and also running the GC 
> procedure.  It would have relinquished CPU eventually.
>
> It's had a long history of memory leaks especially in the graphics and 
> also in active pages (AJAX) but for some reason no one can or will fix 
> it so it continues to leaks.  I've taken to sequestering heavy AJAX 
> pages in Chrome instead and leaving FF to handle normal sites.
>

Hi Alex,

Thanks for that.  It's good to have some idea what's going on.  With the 
latest version of firefox, I haven't seen this behavior in the few hours 
since I first wrote this message.

By the way, I became aware of the memory leak problem about a year ago.  
As far as I know, I've fixed that with the memoryfox plugin.  You can 
check it out here if you like.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/memory-fox/?src=search
https://idevfh.com/how-to-use-memory-fox/
https://idevfh.com/current-memory-fox/
https://idevfh.com/

Sincerely,

Ron


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Ron Frazier
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linuxdude AT techstarship.com