Firefox 3 hogging 90% CPU, can anything be done about this?

[Frank Cox]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:26:39 -0700
Hugh Caley wrote:

> Problem:  After running Firefox for a time (a few minutes to 30 minutes) 
> it will start taking 80%+ of CPU (as shown in top) and will keep taking 
> it until I restart the browser.  This machine is running Fedora 10 
> 32-bit. Firefox firefox-3.0.8-1 flash-plugin-10.0.22.87

I actually haven't seen that problem on any of the Fedora and Centos machines
that I look after.  At least, not in quite some time as I don't remember
anything about it at the moment.  (Knock on wood and so on, of course.)

> This is usually associated with heavy CPU from npviewer.bin, hence the 
> association with flash and flashplayer.

That does make it sound like a Flash problem.
> 
> There are several open tickets on this and similar problems on Adobe's 
> website:
> 
> https://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/

That's probably the best place to take this issue up; Flash is a closed-source
program that nobody can fix other than Adobe.

> I do definitely get the problem on sites such as youtube; however, I 
> also get the problem on sites that don't have any obvious flash content, 
> and frankly, I'm not sure which ones at this point.  Flashblock doesn't 
> seem to catch all of them.  Still trying to find out.

You might want to look at using noscript instead of Flashblock.  It does what
Flashblock does, plus more.  Perhaps a combination of Flashblock and Flash
content contributes to or causes the problem.  What happens if you uninstall
Flashblock and install noscript instead?  Again, that's what I use and I
haven't seen that problem so perhaps that's the reason why.

The last Adobe run-away that I had was a rogue acroread process on Centos 5
that ate up everything to a point that you could barely enter a single
character on the keyboard any more.  When I eventually managed to log into it I
killed that process and everything returned to normal.  But that was acroread,
not Flash.

-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com