idle firefox consuming 90% cpu time after some hours
 

it happens that i walk away from my notebook and forget it is still running. sometimes i come back after some hours and see that the process table in ksysguard shows that the firefox bin consumes between 80-93% of cpu ressources and the computer is basically unusable. what could the cause be and how do i eliminate it?
i hope "reinstall" is no answer. no installation applications work for me and i have been stuck with old software for a while. i plan to either upgrade everything or to completely walk away from linux after four years. my browser on SuSe 10.1 is this: "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; nb-NO; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060425 SUSE/1.5.0.3-7 Firefox/1.5.0.3".

best regards
ungua

You're right - that's pretty old. F/F has become a bit of a pig, although the latest version is better. No sense being held hostage by crappy software - and that applies equally to the distro.
Try something else.

According to wikipedia, that version of Firefox reached its end of life on May 30, 2007 with the release of Firefox 1.5.0.12. Perhaps there's an updated package for SuSe 10.1 that you could install? It'd probably help; if you can, update Firefox to version 3, which is much less of a resource hog than versions 1.5.x or 2.0.x.

thank you for your advice! problem is that i cannot update software at the moment, even logged in as root. i don't understand the problem and for a year or so i have been looking forward to find a weekend's time to redo my configuration of operating systems and to overhaul everything. hard to find that time but it seems it's overdue ... :o

best regards
ungua

There is some user in these forums who thoroughly looked into this issue, but never came up with a fix. The only thing you can do is restart X (ctrl+alt+backspace) and log back in.

Brandon

thank you for your reply! i'm looking forward to a full upgrade then. just to document the use of system resources, here's a screenshot of ksysguard. at no point in time did i touch the notebook, everything is idling. open windows were ksysguard, sysinfo, home/ungua, and firefox.

best regards
ungua

It's definitely time to upgrade 10.1 support has been discontinued.

That second paragraph is probably why you can no longer update..

I wonder where ubuntu/canonical puts their discontinued files :P but it's good to hear suse doesn't just remove them completely :)

i have now managed to upgrade to opensuse 11 (wonderful!) and Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; nb-NO; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008091700 SUSE/3.0.3-1.1 Firefox/3.0.3. to be honest, the newest firefox seems to be consuming even more resources, over 80% cpu time with a couple of tabs open. the same in windows (now xp sp3): it takes its time to start and it is slow in surfing. so the new word is google chrome, or what?

regards
ungua (with no apps yet in the linux version of firefox)

Personally, I wouldn't go with Chrome due to the privacy issues that make Chrome essentially spyware. If you really want to use Google's browser, Iron is Chrome with all the features that report back to Google taken out.

My own browser preference is for Opera.

that's true, i should use opera just to be a patriot. :) firefox actually crashed three times (!) since i wrote the last post and rss-newsfeeds are not always possible to open on first try. that's really bad! the system is 100% updated.
opera does not come with the standard-installation anymore, but i'll have a look at it.

best regards
ungua

edit: can i install a version for an older suse, too, without troubles?

In addition to Chrome's privacy issues, there's no build for Linux yet. However, you can get a Chrome skin for Firefox. It's pretty sleek.

Do you have any add-ons installed in Firefox ?

If so have you tried creating a new profile with no add-ons to see if you have the same issue ?

The sites you have open when you are consuming so many system resources. do they have a lot of animated gifs or flash on them ?

I've found firefox sluggish on linux unless you have a hot CPU. Firefox is much more efficient on Windoz, as strange as that seems. I have a 1.6GHz linux machine, and firefox will saturate its CPU with general surfing and screen refreshes. This might be tuneable by a firefox guru, but if you don't to mess with that, then try Opera or Konqueror.

I've rarely ever seen high CPU usage with Firefox.. now RAM usage is a different story, especially on Windows.. Performance is much better on Linux for me than on Windows..

How interesting so many different experiences with the same piece of software.

I wonder how much the user selected add-ons play into that performance issue. I run no-script and ad-blockPlus so I think I avoid a lot of the junk many sites throw at you..