firefox grows, taking over all resources

[JOSE]

On 9/30/2010 11:09 AM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 11:03:24AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
>> My FIrefox is exhibiting unpleasant behaviour and I wonder if anyone knows
>> how to deal with this.
>>
>> I started Firefox at 1:10 AM this morning and I used it for an hour or
>> two.  It was OK.  I could browse normally.  Which, for me, means having
>> lots of windows and tabs open, effectively for weeks.
>>
>> Now, when I try to continue using it ~7 hours later, it is
>> non-responsive.  Here's output from top:
>>
>>    PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>>   2502 hugh      20   0 9269m 4.6g   9m R 100.0 79.1 497:19.60 firefox
>>
>> It is taking all the CPU available, and has for some time, even while
>> I sleep.  It is also taking 9G of RAM, 4.6G of it being "resident"
>> (real, not virtual) on a machine with 6G.
>>
>> Some web page I have open must be the root of this problem.  As a
>> further support to this theory, I've had to restart my browser a few
>> times recently for similar behaviour.  I always open with the same
>> tabs as before the shutdown.
>>
>> - is there any way to identify which web pages are the problem?  I
>>    don't consider a trial-and-error search to be a useful approach.
>>
>> - is there any way to tell Firefox to limit the resources that it will
>>    consume on behalf of one web page?
>>
>> Note: Flash is blamed for all sorts of browser problems.  Not in this
>> case: I don't have Flash on my system.
>>
>> I capture the stderr and stdout from Firefox.  This run generated no
>> messages.
>
> Well I have started using the firefox 4 beta version.  So far I am
> actually impressed.  It is much faster and much less resource hungry
> than firefox 3.x has been.  Might be worth a try.
>
> It hasn't crashed yet.
>

I have found that even without flash, FF would take resources, mainly to 
some page having a loop script trying to load its content on the page.
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