Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil: Strange Firefox Problem

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Strange Firefox Problem

Does anyone know if there's a memory leak in Firefox? Several times this week, I've been browsing a website that has some kind of animated advertisement, and found that all of a sudden Firefox's CPU usage jumps to about 85%. This then makes my computer's fans kick on in a very loud and annoying manner.

Notably, it doesn't happen under Internet Explorer. However, I can't figure out why this is happening. Any thoughts?

Posted by Anthony on March 23, 2005 12:40 PM | Permalink

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I have seen the same problem, but I don't know the cause either. I have speculated at flaws with Firefox's Flash integration. It appears that the problem may be javascript: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264438

Posted by: Richard Campbell | March 23, 2005 1:57 PM

See, this is one reason why I love blogging. I don't have time to figure this out today, but need a solution. And someone like Richard comes along and just points the way for me. Thanks, Richard! Hopefully I'll have time to look at this later.

Posted by: Anthony | March 23, 2005 2:03 PM

Fascinating. I've had the same problem. After a few hours using Firefox my computer has slowed to a crawl and I want to drop it out the window and kick my dog to boot. With my boot, sorry. Actually, I don't have a dog, so that's just a figure of speech. Anyway, misery loves company, so I'm glad (in a perverse sort of way) that you're suffering too. :) Let's hope it doesn't last.

Posted by: Carey | March 23, 2005 7:03 PM

I noticed the problem too (with the fan), but I never would have made the connection to Firefox. I thought my 8 month old laptop was already dying.

Posted by: Unreasonable Man | March 23, 2005 11:06 PM

This is further proof that the internet is magic. Yesterday while I had multiple Firefox windows open my laptop fan kicked in in a way that I'd only heard when my last desktop was about to die on me. This morning, the answer's here! Spooky.

Posted by: Sherry | March 24, 2005 4:05 AM

Make sure your firefox browser is up to date. You should have version 1.02. If you see a a red circle in the corner of the browser, just click on it and it will update to the latest version. Do you have any extensions on your browser? Those might be the problem.

Posted by: Damien | March 24, 2005 7:33 PM

I have the lastest update for firefox and still, it suck up all the cpu!

Posted by: Jeff | April 14, 2005 4:29 PM

I have 1.0.3. I've seen this problem since 1.0. I have lots of browser windows open & when my machine starts being sluggish I check CPU & Firefox is ranging between 95-99%. I start closing browser windows down & as each one closes there is a momentary drop to the 70s or 80s but within seconds it's back up at 98-99. I cannot attribute it to any particular web page or type of functionality. It doesn't stop pegging the CPU till the last window is closed. I think there is some deep-seated bug causing this... -yosh

Posted by: Yosh | May 15, 2005 4:44 PM

I too have this problem with firefox. I have noticted that it seems to be triggered, by at least, those pages which have transparent layers on them, like you often see with those advertizing overlays. For instance this page will always send my firefox into a 70% cpu consumption and remain that high until I kill firefox. www.channel4.com I am using 1.0 and will upgrade to the latest and see if the problem goes away.

Posted by: mike | May 19, 2005 9:31 PM

I'm having this problem too. It's just started in the last few days. I'm running Firefox 1.0.4 on Windows 2000. The only plugin I'm using is the Yahoo plugin. I think I might remove that to be sure it's the browser. It's getting to the point where my machine locks up for 5 minutes at a time. I can't tolerate it for much longer! The only things that have changed recently that I can identify is that I'm running Oracle JDeveloper 10g, and Apache2 with PHP5 mod installed. When I run all 3 together, Firefox seems to hog my CPU and everything grinds to a halt for minutes at a time. Grrrr. Alison

Posted by: Alison | May 25, 2005 4:17 AM

Update to the latest version of Java from Sun's site. I had this problem a while ago, and some combination of un/reinstalling Java via both Sun's site and via the Mozilla Java plugin installer worked. I'd suggest uninstalling all javas and reinstalling the new one fresh.

Posted by: Todd | June 2, 2005 4:22 PM

I have the same problem with 1.5.0.3 I was browsing http://www.traders.com/ and got a very high cpu usage. If I browse this site with Internet Explorer the cpu usage is 0%.

Posted by: Lopez | May 18, 2006 1:43 PM

I have had the same problem, although I see this is an older post, I hope some of the things mentioned will help- I just installed that flashblock extention, to blok ads and such, so we will see. thanks for the resource.

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