No answer but a suggestion that you try firefox in safe mode, use the default theme, and just click on continue. If that does not stop the problem behaviour then whilst in safe mode also disable all plugins. It would also be worth creating a new profile and repeating the tests again in the new profile in safe mode.

I will try to find time later today to try Firefox 9.0.1 on a Windows 7 64 bit machine to see if I can reproduce this sort of problem, but I think I would have already noticed it if that sort of problem happens even though I have not used firefox much in Windows7.

Reading your description and looking at the linked screenshots the problem looks the sort of thing that will be very noticeable, and if it is down to a regression in firefox 9 I might have expected a distinct flurry of posts complaining about it on this forum. I suppose it may be a problem with the firefox portable install. It is probably worth installing and trialling the standard release Firefox 9.0.1 to see if that works ok on your system.

Possibility it could be partly normal behaviour, what are you actually doing with firefox when you have these problems ?

It may also be worth looking at the memory usage, use about:memory.

Your truncated process explorer screenshot is showing at least three instances of plugincontainer.exe

( Also firefox probably still has a bug that opens multiple instances of plugincontainer.exe when cookies/history is cleared )

Update
I did try Windows 7 on a quad core 64bit machine, the cpu usge was low with no discernable regular spiking. I had firefox open on this forum but no other tabs.

Unexpectedly I did note it had one instance of plugincontainer.exe running, that was unexpected, and at present unexplained. I see no reason why it should have been open. I have attached a screenshot. The grids will be the default 6 seconds like your screenshots.

John99,

Thanks for taking the time to look into that.

For the record, I am running the default theme. I didn't know how to [create a new profile] until just now.

I'll try it out with a clean profile. And I'll upgrade my default (non-portable) FireFox install to 9.0.1 and see if I can duplicate the behavior there. Stay tuned...

For the record, seeing three instances of PluginContainer in the Process Explorer listing didn't strike me as unusual. It's actually been kind of convenient. More than once, it's allowed me to kill the PluginContainer that was running a misbehaving Flash app, without shutting down everything else (but I doubt that kind of thing is good for Firefox's stability).

Btw, where can I find a guide to FireFox's built-in suite of diagnostics, like "about:memory"? (about:memory tells me that I have 11.49 MB of RAM dedicated to the facebook "compartment". Since I'm not logged in to facebook, that's a little surprising...)

Thanks.

Sorry I should have added a link about new profiles. See also basic troubleshooting & http://kb.mozillazine.org/Standard_diagnostic_-_Firefox

The support articles do not cover about:memory it is considered an advanced topic and a lot of it is beyond me. The developer concerned blogs about it see: http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/category/aboutmemory/ iirc there was talk about posting a blog dealing with how to use about:memory, but I am not sure whether anything was ever posted. If you look and find anything please let me know, if there is a tutorial relating to about:memory use I will try and get it linked from one of the kb articles.

My thought about your having multiple instances of plugincontainer.exe was partly that you will probably be getting regular CPU spikes because of memory management.

You may also be interested in

• snappy
  • http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/category/snappy/
  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy
• telemetry (Firefox from 7 uses this for performance monitoring)
  • the add-on gives you a graphical display of the results https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/abouttelemetry/

Hi.

I'm also suffering from this problem. Restarting in safe mode doesn't help, nor disabling Flash plugin (the only one I have installed). If I create a new profile the problem is gone (even with Flash plugin and a few extensions installed), so this must have something to do with my particular profile, but how?!?!

This behavior started with the update to 9.0.1, version 8 was fine. It makes the browser unusable, so any help on diagnosing this would be really appreciated.

Thanks.

Cheers,

mprost

Hi mprost,

By all means read this thread, and post if you are able to help, but start your own question about your problem, that allows you to include system information; and you will get answers specific to your own problem. You may always cross post links from and to your own thread and this thread =link

You have already almost solved the problem if it goes away when you use a new profile. It is relatively easy to transfer bookmarks and passwords etc

Update.

John99, I followed your advice. Used the Profile Manager to create a new profile, which I creatively named "TestProfile". I didn't see any way to set the default profile, and FireFox didn't ask me which profile to use on launch. So I launched FireFox with the new profile "manually", invoking it from the command line with:
firefox.exe -profile "...\profile\TestProfile"

And it made a difference. The excessive usage is way down, under the new profile. See the attached image (I must have missed the "attach image" button the first time I posted here...).

Again, screen grabs from Process Explorer:
1. Usage spikes still occur. The first was when I logged in to Outlook Webmail. The second was exactly 60 seconds later. But then it didn't happen again. And, as before, these spikes involve both CPU cores and cause UI activity to freeze.

2. Basically hands-off , with minimal user/system interaction. Firefox was not minimized, but not in the foreground either. CPU use remained generally low and steady.

3. There are two of my characteristic one-minute-separated CPU usage spikes. These occurred while I was writing this post on support.mozilla.org. Outlook webmail had been logged out and its tab closed for a while (5 minutes?) at this point. Hmm.....

It looks like creating a clean profile reduced the usage spikes significantly. But they still DO occur, and can be provoked by Outlook Webmail.

So, what now? Should I back up my bookmarks, delete the default profile, then create a new profile, and import my old bookmarks? What could be contained in a profile that would cause this sort of behavior, anyway? I haven't added a new plugin in a long time...

Thanks.

Everyone wants firefox running fast and hang free with minimal memory and CPU usage but the ideals tend to conflict especially as Firefox is often used with many extensions, and in all likelyhood masses of tabs, that in turn could contain heary image loads, and maybe animations and video.

Your original truncated screenshot had multiple plugin containers, so was hardly of firefox in a quiescent state. You ae now mentioning webmail, and that could conceviably be one contributor to ramping upmemory usage and then CPU spices from memory management (CC & GC cycles).

As for the differences between use of the two profiles, you have those two profiles to compare and that may provide clues.

Unfortunately troubleshooting tends to fall back on

1. starting firefox in safe mode and a clean profile.
   • if there are problems in that situation it may well be a fault with firefox and a bug may need filing to investigate
2. adding back extensions and trialling different sites and behaviour whilst watching for any problem to re-appear

Btw, where can I find a guide to FireFox's built-in suite of diagnostics, like "about:memory"? (about:memory tells me that I have 11.49 MB of RAM dedicated to the facebook "compartment". Since I'm not logged in to facebook, that's a little surprising...)

You may be interested in reading this article about use of about:memory in troubleshooting cases that could be similar to the above mentioned sort of problem:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Zombie_compartments

I was hoping that the 60-second clockwork regularity might ring a bell with somebody...like a garbage collector or an add-on or Outlook feature or something, that was known to run once per minute.

This issue isn't web-site specific, as such. But it may be web-site-and-FF-9.0.1 specific.

I guess there's no shortcut, I'll just have to add add-ons to a clean profile, one at a time, and try websites 'till I trip the behavior.

Great links to the developer blogs. Fascinating stuff posted from the Snappy and MemShrink projects. Is there a similar project/tool for FireFox code profiling?

To see what's going on during my CPU usage spikes, I'd need to see code profiler output. And...I'm not sufficiently dedicated to run a custom build in a virtual machine to get the data, if there's no built-in tool available.
But I see they just released a new beta, v10.0b6, 6 days ago. I might give that a shot.

Thanks again for the input.

I am on Linux at the moment, but on Windows I normally run the Aurora (Currently Firefox 11) they are pretty stable and trouble free, and it is fairly easy to switch back to a Release or Beta if there are unexpected problems. I also have Nightly installed and you may note that often it is suggested that if a bug is suspected tests should be run using the latest nightly (No need to build yourself there is a channel like the betas), the thinking being that problems may have been already solved in the latest version, and there is little point in developers looking at anything other than major problems on older releases.

The 60 second spikes may well relate to Garbage Collection, but apparently such prominent spikes with hangs do not normally occur, and so it may well relate to what you are running. You will probably get better answers on mozilazine, or maybe on one of the developers blogs or mailing groups, this forum is aimed mainly at the relatively naive or new user.

What you are observing is obviously unacceptably behaviour, but may well be due to some extension or the multiple plugin containers rather than Firefox itself.

Same problem here. This has been a problem for months and months, if not years and years. Usually starts to become annoying after a day or so, basically trying to keep FF (currently 11.0 - Firefox fo openSUSE 12.1) open for a week is simply impossible as I only have 8 Gigs of RAM. If I leave FF open for a weekend (work computer) it has grown to some 3 gigs in size and short freezes are occurring every 10 seconds or so.

So I tried starting a session in safe mode but same result: started FF yesterday and had to restart today as browsing and/or typing anything anywhere was too annoying due to frequent freezes. Obviously safe mode is not the answer. A new profile might help for a while but it's a bit annoying to create new profiles every few months, too.

Keeping Firefox open for a week or more may not be typical behaviour, but I think using safe mode that may not be an unreasonable expectation for an 8 gig computer.
(That Firefrox stays open without freezing every 10 seconds)

I suggest you start your own thread about that problem, someone may consider investigating it further. Note developers are now looking into and making improvements in Firefox memory use, so improvements should already have started to become noticeable.

Exactly. I came back to office today after a weekend and while FF was "only" 2.5Gigs in size (grown 1G by itself over the weekend) it was impossible to use as it would completely freeze for about 4(!) seconds pretty frequently. During the freeze it was consuming 100% of CPU.

I have searched for solutions to this as I can't believe I am the only one having this same issue year after year and apparently I'm not but it also doesn't seem to help to ask/write about it anywhere. People seem to file bug reports and ask about it on forums like this but threads usually end with "no problem found". It seems kind of strange that none of the developers has run into the problem.

But, I'm now trying without tabmixplus, which might cause some of the trouble (as good a guess as any). But since FF insists on keeping tabs on one line instead of multipled ones, one wants to use some tab enhancer anyway...

Developers are continually finding and fixing problems relating to Firefox memory use and speed of operation.

It is also recommended that you enable telemetry feedback, that gives developers data about what is happening in the real world; with ordinary users from their day to day browsing.

• see Share data with Mozilla to help improve Firefox

It is also best to write and ask about a specific problem, something may be done to identify and fix that problem. General firefox is slow or firefox uses a lot of memory questions will not normally get any successful answer, there are just too many variables to consider, every me too is probably a slightly different problem.

yes, performance data submit has been enabled. I even installed the telemetry add-on but how do I save its data? I would be happy to try and help fixing this.

The telemetry data gets sent off to mozilla Firefox. I am not using the telemetry add-on at the moment but IIRC that does display all the data in a graphical format.

If you wish to investigate your specific problem try starting a thread of your own, maybe someone will try to help you, however it is best to investigate the simpler cases, that can be reproduced.

That usually means using minimal extensions and minimal sites. If you use hundreds of tabs for hours on end with dozens of plugins and add-ons it is impossible to demonstrate a simple and reproducible problem that someone is able to work on. (If you do decide to start a new thread please mention it in this one, others may be interested in following it).