[GTALUG] Firefox is a pig

[Walter Dnes]

On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 05:29:07PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote
> After an hour of waiting for "quit" to finish, I gave up and killed
> it.
> 
> | From: self_same_self at yahoo.com
> 
> 
> | What kind of plugins do you have?
> 
> Nothing much.  No flash, for example.
> 
> The scariest is IcedTea (Java).  I don't know how to tell if Java is 
> actually being run.
> 
> The real culprit is likely javascript -- not a plugin.
> 
> | How many tabs and windows?
> 
> Lots.  28 windows.  It isn't convenient to count the tabs (I'd have to 
> visit each of the windows and count the tabs).

  A few items...

* As others have pointed out, the Java plugin is a major security hole,
  a cross-platform equivalant of Active-X.  Remove, or disable the
  plugin.

* As I pointed out on June 22nd, I've gone hog wild with creating
  separate profiles for websites I often visit.  Here's a snippet from
  my ~/.icewm/menu file that sets up part of the launchbar...

menu WEBsets firefox {
  prog DSLR firefox /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P dslreports
  prog GLICE firefox /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P glice
  prog GCL firefox /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P gcl
  prog GRAPHS firefox /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P graphs
  prog HFBOARDS firefox /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P hfboards
  prog SLASHSOY firefox /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P slashsoy
  prog SNOW firefox /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P snow
  prog STREAMS firefox /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P streams
  prog WXFORUM firefox /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P wxforum
  prog WXSHORT firefox /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P wxshort
  prog WXLONG firefox /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P wxlong
  prog WUWT firefox /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P wuwt
  prog YOUTUBE firefox /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P youtube
}

  If you run "top" in a really wide term (e.g. 120 or 130 columns), you
can see breakdowns for which instance is using how much resources.  This
can help you determine which websites are the problem.  *IMPORTANT* This
will only work if the command lines differ from each other.  Specifying
a profile name is sufficient.  Here's the drill...

1) Set up a wide term, at least 120, if not 130 columns wide

2) Run "top -c" in the term.  Alternately, you can run "top" and then
tap the "c" key to toggle *FULL* commandline display on/off.

3) Tap the "o" key (lowercase "owe") for case-insensitive filtering.
Uppercase "O" selects case-sensitive filtering.

4) You'll be prompted like so
add filter #1 (ignoring case) as: [!]FLD?VAL

5) Type in the following line exactly and press {ENTER}
COMMAND=firefox

This will match any line containing the substring "firefox" as part of
the commandline.  Note that if you prefix it with "!", the filter will
show every line *NOT* containg "firefox" in the commandline. i.e.
!COMMAND=firefox

  You'll get something resembling the output in my attachment, which is
rather wide.  Then you can see which instance is using how much
resources.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes at waltdnes.org>
-------------- next part --------------
top - 02:04:57 up 6 days,  2:29, 15 users,  load average: 0.05, 0.12, 0.13
Tasks: 125 total,   1 running, 124 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  4.6 us,  1.8 sy,  0.0 ni, 93.5 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   3101308 total,  1993268 used,  1108040 free,    48512 buffers
KiB Swap:  4194300 total,   801920 used,  3392380 free.   528020 cached Mem

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                             
30091 waltdnes  20   0  559416 152744  35112 S   5.7  4.9  15:54.35 /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P wuwt              
31279 waltdnes  20   0  667604 280620  40540 S   2.3  9.0  20:46.05 /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P hfboards          
29803 waltdnes  20   0  691748 273752  55128 S   2.0  8.8  30:04.19 /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P streams           
 1324 waltdnes  20   0  437948 126268  62084 S   1.0  4.1   1:12.66 /usr/bin/firefox -width 950 -height 1050 -new-insta+
31922 waltdnes  20   0  487888 133468  37808 S   0.3  4.3   0:22.41 /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P wxshort           
30488 waltdnes  20   0  518880 149864  37388 S   0.0  4.8   4:50.33 /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P wxforum           
30543 waltdnes  20   0  450368 103056  34572 S   0.0  3.3   0:07.23 /usr/bin/firefox -new-instance -P graphs