I have a strange habit of having 2, 3 or 4 Firefox browsers open at a time, and sometimes dozens of windows open in tabs in each one. I still have have pages open from before the election, to let you know how weird I am. Anyway, oftentimes things will freeze up due to CPU usage. A specific page will be causing the problem, and I have to try to figure out which page. Once I close that page, everything’s ok again.
Windows Task Manager is no help at all in letting me know what page is causing the problem. Before Firefox, I could look at it and see the CPU usage and know what IE page was spiking. Now, it’s just showing firefox.exe CPU xx.
Is there a plugin for Firefox that I can look at and it will tell me exactly what page is causing a spike so I can close that tab?
Leaving many windows/pages and many tabs on each is as you have learned, a danger to system/Firefox stability. If you don’t need them - close all of them of no immediate use. If you must keep a list of URL’s on “Notepad” for ready access or use “BOOKMARKS.”
I only have trouble with certain pages. For instance, Andrew Sullivan’s blog The Daily Dish causes an immediate spike, so I have to skim it and get out of there as soon as possible. As soon as I close the offending page, the CPU usage drops immediately. Otherwise, I’m fine. Right now though, there’s some page causing a spike and I’m not sure which one it is.
I’m not ready to close everything yet. I do have hundreds and hundreds of pages bookmarked, but I know me, the second a page is bookmarked and closed, means I’ll probably never visit that page ever again. I do have several Notepad files with URLs in them too. I guess I’ll have to start another.
That’s a shame. Seems like there are thousands of Firefox addons (I don’t use any of them) but not this one that would be really really useful? I guess no one else is as bizarre as I am.
Are you running a single core system? If you are, when one CPU gets buried, everything goes to hell, as you describe.
Anyway, I’ve had this problem in FireFox, and when I’ve seen it lock up its because some ad on a site is having trouble loading. Have you tried AdBlock Plus? I have it installed, and don’t get any problems loading Andrew Sullivan’s site.
OTOH, I have my power settings set to spin down my drives when idle (I have four in both of my machines), and I also get the freeze-block if I click on a link (or do other, non browser activities) and a drive spins up, but the delay lasts for maybe 5-8 seconds. Is this maybe part of the issue?
What version of firefox you using? What extensions and plugins you have?
I’m using Firefox 3.0.4 and not noticing any spike. Web rendering isn’t very CPU intensive these days. It sounds like something is causing an infinite loop (just keeps doing the same thing over and over with no instruction to stop).
Since it doesn’t appear to be on the webpage it’s prolly something you’ve added on.
Try disabling all your extensions, restarting firefox, and see if there’s still problems with that page. If not then enable one extension, restart, see if page is fine, enable next one, restart, see if page is fine, etc. until you find the offending one.
You know, I’d also uninstall the Flash plug-in; there’s been some bent Flash installations I’ve seen that were fixed by un- and then re-installing the latest. Just a thought – it probably isn’t Flash, which I’ve had little trouble with, but its worth a try.