A few weeks ago, the performance on my computer started deteriorating badly, and it's not come back. When I execute "top," the culprit, usually eating around 25% of the cpu, is "npviewer.bin." Firefox itself seems to be sitting on 25% of my memory, which seems excessive.

Unless I'm mistaken, npviewer is a wrapper for running flash apps in firefox. I don't have permanent flash apps running on my Wordpress blog page. Is it possible I've acquired a virus of some sort? Can anyone suggest a way to streamline this firefox beast, and help me improve the performance of my desktop machine?

Thanks.

Phil W.

Oh, PS: Fedora core 9 on Athlon i386, 2 gig of RAM.

I doubt it. Flash in linux is just a piece of crap. What version of flash are you using? Did you try to update to the latest possible version?

Firefox doesn't help either, it's a ram hungry beast, but I guess that we will have to live with that for now.

Same here. After a while of browsing and a couple flash *crap* npviewer turns into a wild thing. But I don't mind, restarting Firefox every now and then isn't some huge burden I can't take.

I don't know if you already do, but if you don't, you might want to try noscript or flashblock. That way, you will only see the flash contents that you strictly need, instead of bogging down your system with useless crap.

Wow. I just installed noscript, and my cpu usage dropped to next to nothing. Apparently I had acquired some sort of sticky flash app that was running without my permission.

Thanks for the suggestion, i92. That was the ticket.