Firefox slows down pc......

[Christopher Aillon]

Kaspars wrote:
> 
>  Hi,
> 
>  I search and don`t see that there is topic about my problem yet and 
> don`t know is this here...
>  I`m using fresh FC3 reinstalled for week and updated, problem is that 
> something like to eat my pc power and I found that it is firefox... New 
> firefox when opened couple tabs (last 5) and all try to download some 
> site was fulling my memory/processor, top of the "top":
> 19.0 10.1   2:10.66 firefox-bin
> 10.2 50.3  11:52.26 X
> and load start to fullfill: load average: 5.31, 3.43, 1.98
> 
> Last time load was go so high that something kill some process and pc 
> freeze. Only reboot help...
> So I`m thinking what to do, I have all updated etc. Start to think to 
> compile maybe by my self ff. Don`t know what to do...
> Pc is year old Toshiba Satellite with p4 and 256ram.

Compiling yourself probably won't help much to alleviate the problem since we already do optimize it quite a bit.  However, if you care to do some debugging and profiling work, and can quantify a specific area of performance hit, and file a bug (and dare I say provide a patch?) that would be great.  See e.g. the docs at http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/tools/jprof/README.html or you can use the profiler of your choice.

At the very least, do try and figure out what specific webpage is causing the performance hit and if you can narrow it down further to which specific piece of the page that is even better, and then make sure a bug is filed on it.

And finally, the suggestion you probably don't want to hear: more RAM is probably a good option especially since you will likely get a good bang for the buck here.  You're running at the minimum recommended amount for an FC3 graphical install, and keeping several large, image/animation heavy, etc. web pages in memory will almost certainly cause you pain.  I bet that an upgrade to even 512MB will give you a substantial benefit, even outside of the browser space.