Hi,
Recently updated Firefox to version 29 and after that I noticed a huge downgrade in performance. It constantly causes my system to lock up. I did some monitoring and found out that even after I freshly start Firefox, when opening a new blank tab for example it creates a new process in system activity called “Browser” that instantly eats up +1.9GB and increasing, after few seconds my mouse lags, everything locks up and lags and I have to struggle getting into console mode, login as root and kill the *******. It eats so much RAM that I can hear my HDD and even loging as root takes over 30 seconds after typing the password, I think it fills up my entire swap too. I have absolutely no issue with Chromium, Konqueror, etc, just Firefox. I have no Add-ons, clean. I reproduced the problem several times. Sometimes, plugin-container wich I know is flash does the same thing but even when no Flash content is loaded, like when opening the new tab page in Firefox wich displays the tiles with the most visited websites.
4GB RAM DDR3
X2 240 AMD
openSUSE x64 13.1 KDE with 3.14.0.2 kernel
I just did an openSUSE install on a system with nearly identical specs to yours, and updated it to FF 29 and am not getting the error your speak of. Neither am I with FF 29 on my system with KDE 4.13 and the 3.11.10-7 kernel. Try removing flash through YaST and delete the directory: ~/.mozilla and restart the browser. You will need to backup any bookmarks before doing this. I don’t see any process running called “browser” on my system, nor did I on the aforementioned PC, so I have no idea what that is. Are you sure it’s not an add-on?
Yes I know its weird, I already reinstalled Firefox though I didn’t delete the profile .Mozilla folder. This “browser” process appeared recently after Firefox 29. Will do a clean install, remove Flash and get back with results.
I am sure it is not a plugin, I removed them all.
On 2014-05-16 01:56, robertot5 wrote:
>
> Hi,
> Recently updated Firefox to version 29 and after that I noticed a huge
> downgrade in performance. It constantly causes my system to lock up. I
> did some monitoring and found out that even after I freshly start
> Firefox, when opening a new blank tab for example it creates a new
> process in system activity called “Browser” that instantly eats up
> +1.9GB and increasing, after few seconds my mouse lags, everything locks
> up and lags and I have to struggle getting into console mode, login as
> root and kill the *******. It eats so much RAM that I can hear my HDD
And using swap.
It is possible to start an application with a memory limit imposed, so
that it is killed automatically if it runs away:
ulimit -v 1500000
firefox
And there are other variants of *limit to limit on the appropriate type
of memory.
This way you don’t have to fight the machine to kill a runaway process
when it is heavily swapping.
You can also use an addon as “flashblock” so that flash animations are
not loaded till you click on them.
Just out of curiosity are you using Catalyst or the Open Source graphics drivers ? I noticed from your signature you are on Kernel 3.14. Have you tried turning off hardware acceleration in FF ?
Ok so I did a clean reinstall, both Firefox and Flash. Added FlashBlock addon and went to some usual websites, it worked fine for a few hours until I went to IMDB to search for a movie and then after some scrolling I noticed the issue appeared again. Tried to open system monitor CTRL+ESC, it did opened after a few seconds, meanwhile mouse lagging and everything stuck. The unknown “browser” process was there again, using 1.9GB of ram and Firefox itself went to over 1GB.
I don’t have sync, account, nothing in my Firefox now, this is extremely annoying.
I have the open-source, not Catalyst. Disabling hardware acceleration in FF does nothing.
On 2014-05-16 12:46, robertot5 wrote:
> until I went to IMDB to search for a movie and then after some scrolling
> I noticed the issue appeared again. Tried to open system monitor
> CTRL+ESC, it did opened after a few seconds, meanwhile mouse lagging and
> everything stuck. The unknown “browser” process was there again, using
> 1.9GB of ram and Firefox itself went to over 1GB.
Just a guess, no guaranties: in privacy settings, see if “clean navigation data when leaving firefox” is unchecked. If not, try unchecking it. As a last ditch attempt, quit ff and rename your profile to something else, restart ff.
> quit ff and rename your profile
> to something else, restart ff.
Instead of doing that, just create a new user and run FF with that user.
That ensures you use a completely new profile with no addons, no desktop
config encumbrances. It is the closest thing to a reinstall, is very
fast to do, and does absolutely no changes to your normal user.
Wow that sounds bad! Interestingly I had a tweet from Firefox yesterday saying that they recommend not enabling Adblock as there is a bug that causes a memory hog. Have you installed this pluggin? Just a thought
> Adblock Plus isn’t a plugin. It is an extension.
>
> Plugins are Flash, Java, &c.
>
> Adblock Plus does cause Firefox to use more memory when enabled.
>
> ‘AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage | Nicholas
> Nethercote’ (http://tinyurl.com/o9x84lw)
That’s a very interesting read!
And a discussion on reddit.com, where one of the participants is a
chrome dev, and they talk about the issues that ABP runs into / causes.
The jewels are hidden in the cruft. There is not FF dev in the
discussion, so that we could compare, pity.
The alternatives to ABP would be to block entire domains, with a big
hosts file, block scripts (needs lot of exception training), block
flash. All of that needs much less CPU/RAM, but they can impair browsing.
Interesting: use privoxy.
Interesting: IE9 has a little known native feature to do some limited
URL blocking (Tracking Protection Lists), and you can add lists to it,
published by others.
And I just found out that chrome has a “task manager”, which can be
invoked with “shift-esc”!
I’d love that feature in Firefox! :-)~~~ (slurp). O:-)
Well, I tried with new user, limit, renaming users, clean install and it still does the “thing”.
Now, I see it gets stuck using much less memory but still the mouse lags and the system becomes almost unusable, like it hogs the CPU but taks manager shows no such thing.
Take a look at the screenshot below, the mouse lagged and I barely got to kill the process.
On 2014-05-19 23:46, robertot5 wrote:
>
> Well, I tried with new user, limit, renaming users, clean install and it
> still does the “thing”.
I never said “rename user”.
I said “create NEW user”, and try with that user.
> Now, I see it gets stuck using much less memory but still the mouse lags
> and the system becomes almost unusable, like it hogs the CPU but taks
> manager shows no such thing.
> Take a look at the screenshot below, the mouse lagged and I barely got
> to kill the process.
>
> http://imgur.com/wRkRBHR
Well… firefox is using very little CPU and RAM. see mine, from “top”:
> PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
> 18798 cer 20 0 2085292 545208 30876 S 1.657 13.77 41:51.80 firefox
> 14795 cer 20 0 1850972 389596 23636 S 0.331 9.843 8:08.42 thunderbird-bin
I really don’t understand what causes this, and why only firefox. I have to use chromium now, I don’t recall installing anything new besides updates, it’s my work pc.
The lagging of the entire system is beyond me. I think I’m going to make a video of this fenomena and post it here so you guys understand exactly what’s happening.
What I noticed today is that moments after I succeed in killing firefox’s process the system still lags for about 20 seconds and in task manager several processes get "disk sleep " statuses, I suppose that means they are waiting for disk access, right?
Bad sectors can cause a sector to be reread until it works and Linux won’t give up so it tries until the check sums works and blocks things until successful .
Not sure if that is what is happening but I have seen it and you usually will hear a tick tick sound from the hard drive as it tries to reread a sector
Ok, ok, then just say so, not that you renamed users. It confuses things
a lot.
> I really don’t understand what causes this, and why only firefox. I have
> to use chromium now, I don’t recall installing anything new besides
> updates, it’s my work pc.
> The lagging of the entire system is beyond me. I think I’m going to make
> a video of this fenomena and post it here so you guys understand exactly
> what’s happening.
Leave a terminal open with “top” running. Have another one with “tailf
/var/log/messages”. Even another one with “iotop -o”, this one as root
(su -). Maybe one of them shows something.
> What I noticed today is that moments after I succeed in killing
> firefox’s process the system still lags for about 20 seconds and in task
> manager several processes get "disk sleep " statuses, I suppose that
> means they are waiting for disk access, right?
Maybe. In the terminal running “top” you can press “f”, and select
fields to display. One of them, “WCHAN”, would show this. Another field,
“SWAP”, will display how much swap a process is using. If this
particular figure goes up and up, the system slows down as whole.
Hi,
I tried to reproduce the issue today but I couldn’t, I opened tens of tabs loaded with multimedia websites, it didn’t want to freeze up, that is weird because most of the time it freezes with just one tab opened.
The swap doesn’t change in TOP so I guess it wasn’t used.
Nothing happened in /var/log/messages other than a few “pam_systemd(su:session): pam_putenv: delete non-existent entry; XDG_RUNTIME_DIR” and 2 “Started Session 286 of user root.” wich I guess are from me launching iotop ar root.
