This issue is not relevant to EuroGA but is very relevant because a lot of people – myself included – use Firefox.
Reports appear all over the internet but nobody seems to have come up with a solution that works other than probably by accident. The result is a very sluggish PC.
I’ve been getting this a lot and have done a lot of testing on different PCs. It turns out that on a dual core processor the usual “problem figure” is 50%, and on a quad core it is 25%. So whatever the trigger for the problem is, it looks like FF ends up running a tight loop of code which doesn’t yield control back to the O/S. Under windows, you will always get close to 100% CPU usage (or 100% usage on one processor core if it’s a multi core processor) if you do that (and only a stupid programmer would write such code knowingly).
The issue seems to be related to scenarios where FF’s config is blocking some website feature. I am using the no-script plug-in which can easily trigger the issue, but it is there (intermittently) even if all scripts (on a particular website) are enabled.
Are you sure this is an issue with firefox or just some crappy javascript code from a webpage that doesn’t want to relinquish the CPU?
Or maybe some flash code?
Whenever I feel like firefox uses too much CPU time, I usually kill off all plugin-containers (where eg. the flash plugin lives), that helps, dramatically.
Very possibly you are right, but I don’t know enough about how to check this.
I didn’t know it was possible for javascript to run a tight loop like that. I thought javascript ran in some sort of protected environment 
Flash… not likely. I avoid websites that use that, as far as I can.
How do you kill off the flash containers?
For Firefox I highly recommend NoScript, the plugin lets you run JavaScript only on whitelisted domains. It’s a highly efficient tool for protecting yourself against malicious sites using JavaScript to do nasty stuff. It also blocks flash
http://noscript.net
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/.
Peter,
I’ve had several issues with Java and Java script recently, not only with Firefox but it is true that it can get into endless loops and other time consuming states easier than others. I’ve had it several times in recent weeks that websites would not even start and, after being allowed to hang for a while, come up with a prompt telling me to update Java. After which the respective site would start up normally again, for a day or two, before the next Java update was required….
Yes…. it was no-script that started off the problem
I found that – on any of a number of websites – if I disabled some of the (not sure of the correct terminology) secondary links (like skimresources.com – there are hundreds of them) the CPU usage would shoot up to 25% or 50%. Enabling those links would immediately fix the problem.
I think that if the browser tries – but can’t – download some of the stuff, it goes into a tight loop. That is just stupid programming because the server for that stuff could be slow or faulty and then you end up with a really crappy unresponsive computer. Any code which fetches stuff from a web server needs to send off the request and then go to sleep, until stuff starts to come in (or some equivalent way of doing that).
It is tempting to remove no-script but I think it does increase browsing security because an infected website which does silent redirection is not going to cause a problem. OTOH it causes a lot of hassle with websites which do dodgy popups e.g. the notorious and stupid Verify by Visa process.
But this is a recent problem. I have been using N-S for years. The FF “developers” have broken something, but the countless posts about this in the FF “support” forums (most from people who don’t use N-S or anything like it) suggest they either don’t know what it is, or they do know but for some reason don’t want to fix it because the fix would break something else.
killall plugin-container under linux, no idea how to do it under windows
killall plugin-container under linux, no idea how to do it under windows
Shutdown, format hard drive, install Linux.
Frequent problem with browsers in my experience.
I have been using Firefox with Noscript and DoNotTrackMe for quite some time, and haven’t seen this kind of behaviour. I have, however, seen Firefox temporarily freeze on certain sites with complex formatting and sluggish server response, and I have a feeling it may be freezing while waiting for either CSS or JS files to load.
