Why does my Firefox run great for about two hours, then suddenly slow to a crawl?
As indicated in the question, my Firefox runs fine for about two hours after initial start up, then slows to a crawl with ten or fifteen second lags in between page turns, even return pages that have already been loaded once. Same is true for trying to type text in the browser, at various email accounts, for instance. I'll type, but nothing appears. Then five or ten seconds later the text appears. This only happens when in the browser, not when working offline on something like a Word doc.
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I wonder if you can see any obvious clues as to what may be happening to cause slowness. Running low on memory and having to use a paging file will drastically slow down Firefox. The standard version of Windows Firefox is only 32 bit even if you have large amounts: 8 or 16 GB of RAM on your 64bit computer Firefox will not be able to use all of that.
You mention various email accounts. Sometimes webmail may use surprising amounts of memory. Also glance at CPU use is that maxing out.
Does any of this help identify likely problems
Boot the computer in Windows Safe mode with network support to see if that has effect in case security software is causing problems.
In reply to John99, I'm using Windows 7 Pro 64 bit with 8g of ram and 207g of free space. I usually do have two or three web mail pages open at a time, and maybe another page or two of misc., but things will still run fine for a period of a couple hours, and then the brakes come on. Even closing all the windows and re-starting the browser doesn't seem to help. I'll have to look for the cpu meter in order to monitor.
To cor-el, I'll check out all the links, and try opening in Safe mode. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "with network support".
Okay, with six browser windows and several cpu related windows open,the desktop gadget (which I don't use any of) says the ram is at 35% and the cpu fluctuates between 7 and 17.
In most computers, there are several type of Safe Mode. The primary ones used most are;
- Safe Mode: Only programs that came with the computer are started. No other programs will be started unless the user starts them.
- Safe Mode with Networking: Same as above but the network drivers (internet) will also be running.
This is a way to test if one of the other programs on the computer is causing the issue.
The CPU use will not be an issue, unless the 17% is only Firefox and some other processes are also hogging CPU. Not too sure about RAM that may be ok as long as it is not Firefox using nearly all of that 35%, but then the symptom would probably be crashing of Firefox rather than it slowing down. I think 32 bit processes like Firefox are limited to using 2GB (There is now a 64bit Firefox for Windows available).
I do wonder if it could be other processes that are the culprit. I note you added
" Even closing all the windows and re-starting the browser doesn't seem to help."
It does not seem to be lack of CPU resources or RAM. Did you read the article cor-el linked to the Windows 7 part:
Do applications besides Firefox slow down. For instance playing a downloaded Movie or editing large documents. If so it may be a more general Windows issue and maybe this article helps