Ubuntu
firefox package

Firefox consumes far too many resources

Asked by Alan AZZERA

Hi,

my computer is running under Ubuntu 14.04, and my system is fully up to date. I currently have, from months now, a very annoying problem. Due to the large amount of RAM I always gave to my systems, I took the (bad ?) habit to use many many tabs with Firefox. But before the 14.04 version, it needed ~ 200 tabs to bring my system on its knees. I presently have only 35 tabs opened, and my system is largely unresponsive. I use though Fflashblock and AbBlock extensions. It is particularly marked with Firefox : typing in an address is awfully slow (1 letter per second !), but I can enter a command at a normal speed in a terminal...

More : in the monitoring app, I can see Firefox is consuming ~ 45% of my resources. But htop in a terminal says it consumes more or less 100 % of CPU : that makes a huge difference ! I also noticed that Firefox seems to barely release the memory it used to display a page, after its closing. Reducing the amount of tabs doesn't seem to free the corresponding memory, and I often need to kill & restart Firefox to decrease memory consumption. The next problem is then that the recover mechanism is not that reliable...

I must also say I often use sleep mode, rather than normal (I mean : complete) shutdown : I don't know if this could have any influence on my situation...

Finally, here is a brief description of my system : Pentium E-5200 (2 cores @ 2,5 GHz), 8 GB RAM. It's not a recent computer, but it should be still considered as decent, AFAIK. Hey : my androphone (4 cores ARM A7 @ 1,2 GHz max) with Chrome and only 1 GB RAM is perfectly able to handle 60+ tabs ! With no slow down at all !

Thanks in advance for any opinion or clue. Best regards,

Al

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Revision history for this message
actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

What is the output of :

lsb_release -a; uname -a; apt-cache policy firefox

Thanks

Revision history for this message
Alan AZZERA (azzera-alan) said : 		#2

/I/ thank you for your attention.

>>> lsb_release -a; uname -a; apt-cache policy firefox :
LSB Version: core-2.0-amd64:core-2.0-noarch:core-3.0-amd64:core-3.0-noarch:core-3.1-amd64:core-3.1-noarch:core-3.2-amd64:core-3.2-noarch:core-4.0-amd64:core-4.0-noarch:core-4.1-amd64:core-4.1-noarch:cxx-3.0-amd64:cxx-3.0-noarch:cxx-3.1-amd64:cxx-3.1-noarch:cxx-3.2-amd64:cxx-3.2-noarch:cxx-4.0-amd64:cxx-4.0-noarch:cxx-4.1-amd64:cxx-4.1-noarch:desktop-3.1-amd64:desktop-3.1-noarch:desktop-3.2-amd64:desktop-3.2-noarch:desktop-4.0-amd64:desktop-4.0-noarch:desktop-4.1-amd64:desktop-4.1-noarch:graphics-2.0-amd64:graphics-2.0-noarch:graphics-3.0-amd64:graphics-3.0-noarch:graphics-3.1-amd64:graphics-3.1-noarch:graphics-3.2-amd64:graphics-3.2-noarch:graphics-4.0-amd64:graphics-4.0-noarch:graphics-4.1-amd64:graphics-4.1-noarch:languages-3.2-amd64:languages-3.2-noarch:languages-4.0-amd64:languages-4.0-noarch:languages-4.1-amd64:languages-4.1-noarch:multimedia-3.2-amd64:multimedia-3.2-noarch:multimedia-4.0-amd64:multimedia-4.0-noarch:multimedia-4.1-amd64:multimedia-4.1-noarch:printing-3.2-amd64:printing-3.2-noarch:printing-4.0-amd64:printing-4.0-noarch:printing-4.1-amd64:printing-4.1-noarch:qt4-3.1-amd64:qt4-3.1-noarch:security-4.0-amd64:security-4.0-noarch:security-4.1-amd64:security-4.1-noarch
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS
Release: 14.04
Codename: trusty
Linux gurney-nas-e5200 3.13.0-43-generic #72-Ubuntu SMP Mon Dec 8 19:35:06 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
firefox:
  Installé : 34.0+build2-0ubuntu0.14.04.1
  Candidat : 34.0+build2-0ubuntu0.14.04.1
 Table de version :
 *** 34.0+build2-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 0
        500 http://ftp.oleane.net/ubuntu/ trusty-updates/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-security/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     28.0+build2-0ubuntu2 0
        500 http://ftp.oleane.net/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages

Revision history for this message
actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#3

Have you tried disabling the plug in to see how much difference it makes.... it's worth exploring

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