Arch Linux

poobare

Member

Registered: 2009-03-09

Posts: 10

Firefox at a Standstill

Hello,

The last few days I've noticed that firefox is occasionally running very slow. This isn't that unusual because I often have over a hundred tabs open and sometimes one of the tabs eats up all of the cpu (gmail, for instance, occasionally decides to do this). When I check it out in top I notice low cpu and memory usage (<10%). I started a new session and was having the same problem even with a couple of tabs. Restarting the computer had no effect. Today it's gotten to the point where firefox doesn't even draw anything in the window when I open it (I'm using opera right now).

I don't know what could possibly cause this but I've only made minor changes recently. I set up a proxy in firefox because I'm in a different network, but how could this cause this problem (again opera, elinks, wget, etc all work fine with the proxy). The other thing that happened is that my /var partition filled up so I cleared out some uninstalled packages using pacman -Sc. I also did a pacman -Syu but I do this every week and I don't think there were any firefox/ethernet related upgrades this time around. I haven't made any other changes to my system in a few weeks.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

dyscoria

Member

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 1,007

Re: Firefox at a Standstill

What addon's do you use? Addons are a common culprit of memory leaks and instability.

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bernarcher

Forum Fellow

From: Germany

Registered: 2009-02-17

Posts: 2,281

Re: Firefox at a Standstill

This looks like a memory issue. Cleaning the cache (at least) often helps.

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poobare

Member

Registered: 2009-03-09

Posts: 10

Re: Firefox at a Standstill

Thanks for your replies. I made a new profile that has no addons and a clear cache. It worked for about 30 seconds before it just totally froze. Again there seems to be no shortage of cpu, memory, or storage on the computer when this happens. This seems very strange.

Is there any way it's related to X? My guess is that if firefox were having trouble rendering the pages the cpu usage would go up. Maybe it's having trouble drawing them somehow?

Last edited by poobare (2009-03-29 00:11:18)

bernarcher

Forum Fellow

From: Germany

Registered: 2009-02-17

Posts: 2,281

Re: Firefox at a Standstill

This is weird. Which firefox version/package are you using?
Any messages when you run firefox from a console?
Which DE/WM?

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To know or not to know ...
... the questions remain forever.

poobare

Member

Registered: 2009-03-09

Posts: 10

Re: Firefox at a Standstill

All I get is 'Xlib:  extension "Generic Event Extension" missing on display ":0.0".' once in a while which I thought was a common thing. I have version firefox 3.0.7-1 and I use wmii as a window manager. I think that this string contains the relevant information about my video card: 'VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)'. One out of twenty times or so X comes up with the wrong resolution but other than that I haven't had any notable problems.

cob4lt

Member

Registered: 2009-03-30

Posts: 4

Re: Firefox at a Standstill

I think this is because Xorg was not compiled with Generic Event Extension. Am I wrong?

ybotspawn

Member

From: Oz

Registered: 2008-04-06

Posts: 140

Re: Firefox at a Standstill

Do the event logs say anything?

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Ranguvar

Member

Registered: 2008-08-12

Posts: 2,549

Re: Firefox at a Standstill

Yeah, try running firefox from a shell and see what it says when it freezes.

jRRYo

Member

Registered: 2008-11-28

Posts: 8

Re: Firefox at a Standstill

no really, over a houndred for real?