firefox grows, taking over all resources

[Lennart Sorensen]

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.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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