Firefox 3.0.4 overheats system - memory & cpu use inacceptable
 

Firefox recently updated to version 3.0.4. After that, the fan started to run permanently, which I recognised after a while, I then was puzzled a bit since I didn't do anything that should use a lot of CPU. CPU-temperature went up to 78 degrees Celsius, completeley inacceptable and at least 20 degrees above normal (screenshot). The room temperature was only 16 degrees, too. Upon closing the browser temperature fell instantly to 48 degrees, later 47, running FF again made it rise almost as fast again. Is this an interference with the ACPI measuring of temperature or is this absurd use of resources real? I now run Opera, which probably is a better browser. But I haven't found anything similar to Adblock yet, which is my only application in FF. I had four tabs open: Gmail, research page with only text from ÖIF, only text page from IMF and a search result page from Youtube.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; nb-NO; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008103100 SUSE/3.0.4-3.1 Firefox/3.0.4

on

Linux 2.6.25.18-0.2-pae i686, openSUSE 11.0 (i586), KDE 3.5.9 "release 49.1"

Best regards
Ungua

remove YouTube from the equation
 

Ungua, Have you tried running only Firefox 3.0.4 by itself and comparing the CPU temperature to non-Firefox ?

Opera has ad-blocking but it's not set up in advance like Adblock is. You'll have to define your own URL patterns, or maybe figure out a way to import a subscription list from an Adblock provider.

I get problems with arbitrary spikes in CPU and disk usage in Firefox 3 as well. At one point I heard my problems were related to the list of malicious sites it purportedly uses. Bookmark organization seems really slow too. Of course, now that everybody has really really heavy JavaScript on their sites, it certainly doesn't help. Don't even bother to try Facebook in FF2 anymore! Flash is a pain as well - this I've noticed nearly always caused CPU usage to go to 100% when watching a Flash video like on YouTube. Thank Ford that Firefox doesn't run plugins in parallel yet.

You can download an adblocking list (urlfilter.ini) for Opera from here: http://my.opera.com/mp3geek/blog/ or here http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/ . The file includes instructions on how to use it.

For Firefox, have you tried installing the NoScript plugin, and does this make any difference?

I saw a similar issue with Firefox (Debian Iceweasel), when viewing Flash.. Normal browsing was fine for CPU utilization.
I hit a site with flash then my CPU spiked to 85-100% until the flash was done playing.
There is something seriously wrong with that.. If it wasn't before, flash is becoming evil..

Debian Lenny, (Testing), Firefox/Iceweasel 3.0.3 / Adobe Flash v. 10

@HeyMull, you mean without having Ksysguard running? This might be worth a try, but I'll have to start Ksysguard to check the temperature. :)

@eternal-newbie, thank you very much for your advice on Adfilters in Opera - it's installed now. I have had the Noscript-plugin before, but haven't installed it since I went to OpenSuSe 11. Will try!

About the Flash-problem: The whole computer eventually slows down in the middle of YouTube-videos. It comes up arbitrary and will take a few seconds, after that the video will continue following it's audio and the whole machine works again.

It seems Opera is a bit slower than FF, is that possible? Maybe my machine becomes way too outdated?: HP NX6110 with Intel® Celeron® M processor 1.50GHz, 748,6 MB RAM.

Best regards and thank you for your advice!
Ungua

edit: With NoScript everything seems to work better - thank you for the tip! But running FF compares to Opera with a CPU that still is 4 degrees warmer. Isn't that strange?

I too have gotten these strange spikes in CPU usage, but why ? Are they planning on fixing it ? Until it is fixed I'm staying with FF 2.0. As for Flash player, try version 10, it is significantly more efficient than 9.

There's something wrong with firefox 3.x and it's not flash.

Flash has it's own assortment of problems, but firefox kills my cpu on regular sites, where flash is not involved. I don't run any extensions either, except for flashblock and one to handle ed2k links.

There's also the annoying scroll bug, which really takes my machine to its knees when I scroll on pages that has a floating layer over a fixed background, but it has nothing to do with this issue either.

It also renders localhost:4080 (the mldonkey daemon web frontend) completely unusable due to some issue with the scrolling (which seems not to be the same problem since the css floats/fixed background clauses are not involved as far as I know).

All of these work without a problem in seamonkey. However it lacks some other things. I would be very happy to bury firefox right now, if I had a valid replacement.

The resource usage may not be Firefox per se, it may be just because you are looking at something video intensive. How much or your system resources are needed to deal with video is more a function of your video card (or onboard video processor) capabilities than anything else. On my last system (may it now R.I.P. with a blown mobo) the thing would idle with no load to speak of. Throw a video transcode at it (e.g., transcode from mpeg2 to something else) and the CPU would spike and it would begin to heat up. If your temp goes up that fast and that far with high CPU use you might consider cleaning or replacing your CPU heatsink/fan with a better one and using a good paste (like ArcticSilver). Does your case have good ventilation? Cables out of the way? Are your fans appropriately sized and do you have enough of them? Is everything clean-ish and not burried under a ton of dust?

If you want to manually create "absurd use of resources" for testing, try this:

... your CPU will spike. That script may not be as sophisticated as your Firefox (video?) problem, but it will eat up resources just as quickly!

I can't speak for the OP, but as I said in the post that is above yours, this happen in sites that are very simple. And by simple I am not talking about the look, but about plain text based sites that sometimes doesn't even use javascript, nor images, nor videos. Just text.

Just so you are sure: I have htop permanently in front of my nose, so any unusual thing (like libflashplayer.so doing idiotic things) would immediately become evident to me.

There's nothing weird on my machine. Firefox 3.x is just problematic for a number of reasons. Seamonkey 2 uses the same engine and has no problem rendering my sites at a very acceptable speed, without hogging the rest of my apps in the while due to cpu waste. So that leaves gecko/xulrunner out of the equation. It's something specific to firefox, and that has nothing to do with external scripts, addons nor flash.

I would be more than happy to be probed wrong and find a solution.

That sounds nasty! :-)

After reading the OP's report, I tried my Firefox (version 3.0.4 running on Ubuntu 8.10 at the moment) and didn't see the CPU use go up until I was viewing some video on the various news websites. Other websites - even complex ones (but without video) - did not bring Firefox's CPU usage up about it's nominal 2% or 3% on my computer. Videos bumped that usage up to between 35% and 50%. But as soon as the video ended, CPU use dropped back down into the dirt. The tells me that most likely there's something else involved in this that makes it worse for some people than others. Maybe hardware or video driver related interaction with Firefox. Maybe even something in the kernel you are using. I don't know the answer - too many variables.

It's hard to say really. There are lots of pieces involved, and there are lots of similar bugs. It's hard to tell what conditions are those that produce the problem because sometimes you can't differentiate one bug from 20 similar ones. Also, it seems to go worse and worse with the time. The first few hours firefox performs acceptably (in which regards this, the scroll bugs are always "On"). So it seems to degrade with the time, however I am sure it's not firefox lacking memory (I never thought I'd say that :p ).

For me when it performs ok it can take between 20%-30%, with some peaks at 50 or even more. However the rest of applications continue running normally. But when it degrades even regular text links take very long to react, and mplayer in my second monitor starts lagging like mad (regular mpeg stuff, not a heavy codec for nowadays standards).

I have some hopes on seamonkey 2 however. And alpha2 is near from what I heard. ;)

I can only agree with i92guboj, even though I am not half as sophisticated when it comes to knowing what happens backstage in soft- and hardware. The CPU usage is high, and rising over time, with very simple websites. I was not watching videos when the temperature hovered at 78 degrees. But it is also true that watching videos is very resource-intensive, at least in Firefox (not at all in Kaffeine, Xine etc), and that the HP NX6110 has some general overheating issues. But that is also why I keep it clean, elevated and watch the temperature, so this rise was highly unusual, no doubt. Even in Windows, FF 3.0.4 seems to require some extra CPU capacity, starting up takes rather long (at least compared to Chrome and Opera), it stops sometimes when used, then especially again when watching videos.

Best regards
Ungua

Firefox 3.0.11
 

Ungua, have you figured out your overheating CPU problem yet? Has the latest Firefox - and the latest linux kernel - taken care of it?

I for one have noticed that Windows XP makes my 5 year old Acer laptop hot, and the fan runs almost continuously, while the latest Ubuntu (8.10) hardly kicks my fan on at all.