Firefox Consumes the CPU

Firefox Consumes the CPU

Category: Quickies

Q:

No matter what I do, including extensive research on Firefox site and the Internet, I still get CPU usage of 99% with Firefox, and it won't go away. It stops my system until I shut it down with ctl-alt-delete. Sometimes, it shows 0% usage and then won't even load. I'm pretty good with this stuff, and this still stumps me. (XP2 1G RAM, all up to date, trust me...)




A:

And people wonder why I'm sticking with Internet Explorer. :-) Anyone else have this problem, or a solution?

If you think you know the answer, post your comments below.

Posted by on 31 Aug 2005


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Most recent comments on "Firefox Consumes the CPU"

(See all 42 comments for this article.)

Posted by:

kay
19 Oct 2008

Some users that have an ATI Radeon Card are experiencing this (me as well) with the latest ATI drivers. To remedy this problem download the ATI Radeon OMEGA drivers based on 7.10 (NOT 7.12 AS YOU WILL HAVE THE SAME PROBLEM).

This helped me tremendously and now FF2 and FF3 run fine and speedy with hardly any cpu/ram usage.


Posted by:

Pank
06 Nov 2008

Hello,

I am having Sony Vaio laptop (1.6 GHz, 80 GB hard disk and 1 GB RAM). Since 3 months, I am facing major issues. Whenever I start browing (IE or Opera or Firefox) or even when connect external hard disk (to copy data to my laptop), CPU shoots to 100% and stays there making my machine dead slow. Finally I did the following:

1) Did the complete system restore and now laptop is set to factory setting

with no extra software and all 80 GB free. So it is as good as new system

2) also increaded RAM to 1 GB from initial 512 MB

3) have done all performance related task like Defragmentation, Disk Cleanup. I guess since its a fresh system recovery, so no need of doing this.

4) Have Mcafee running on my machine and no virus threat detected.

5) All drivers are up to date

Finally I found something related to my issue on microft support site.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/890582/en-us

This was the exact problem what I was facing and I upgraded my windows XP Professional SP2 to latest SP3 patch. STILL THE SAME OLD PROBLEM PERSITS.

Any solution would be really be appreciated.


Posted by:

Andy
21 Jan 2009

Thanks Alan - I did what you suggested and it seems to work so far - I have FF V3.0.5 -- Andy :-)

options > security. Untick the 'tell me if the site i am visiting is a suspected forgery'. box.>>>>


Posted by:

Andy
30 Apr 2009

- I - today got this problem - I did system restore - and it went away. If you didn't do that on time - sorry - Firefox is a great browser.

P.S. Last thing I did was install Adobe Shockwave Player - I bet that patched me...


Posted by:

Andy
30 Apr 2009

- I've just now unchecked the dodgy site warning - and it's even lower (CPU) and stable - thanx.
- And remember - anything wrong - do system restore straight away.


Posted by:

Alex
12 May 2009

Thanks Alan,

I don't understand why this trick works, but thanks a bunch. I was about to transition everything to internet explorer (which I don't like).

Cheers to you!


Posted by:

John
19 May 2009

Look at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=675175&start=45&st=0&sk=t&sd=a, especially the part about deleting the cookies.txt and/or cookies.sqllite. This helped for me.


Posted by:

geek
11 Oct 2009

Get more ram.


Posted by:

Don
24 Mar 2010

Try this to fix the Firefox CPU usage problem.
enter in address bar about:config
find entry browser.catch.memory.enable
double click to change value from true to false.
restart the browser.
This worked for me.


Posted by:

Roland
06 Apr 2010

try this.
www.geekstogo.com/forum
they helped me with high CPU and freezing in Firefox
.. windows xp.
also, disabled indexing, takes a lot CPU
and auslogics disk defrag. amazed how quick and efficient it is.
good luck
Roland.


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