Short freezes in Firefox

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I’m running FF 3.6.3 on Vista Home Premium SP2. My Firefox has frequent short “hangs” lasting about 0.5 – 2.0 sec. This is very noticeable when displaying videos e.g. in Youtube; the video freezes but the sound doesn’t. But anything in FF will suffer from this, even typing. It makes it really painful to use FF sometimes.

I asked about this in the Mozilla forums and didn’t get any solutions, but it might be worth looking there to see more details, see what I’ve already tried, etc.

Any ideas? I’m seriously considering switching to Chrome if I can’t resolve this.

Thanks!
Gary

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I’m running FF 3.6.3 on Vista Home Premium SP2. My Firefox has frequent short “hangs” lasting about 0.5 – 2.0 sec.

One reason Firefox sometimes “pauses” is for cache pruning. There’s no such thing as the perfect cache size, but perhaps if you make some adjustments you can find a setting that works better for your needs.

I asked about this in the Mozilla forums and didn’t get any solutions, but it might be worth looking there to see more details, see what I’ve already tried, etc.

MozillaZine is actually not the official Firefox support forum, but the people there are very good and less overworked than on the official forum.

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Do you mean Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Network tab -> Offline storage? That’s the only cache adjustment I know of. I’ve raised it from 50MB to 200MB as a test.

But I doubt that’s it, unless FF is in the habit of pruning its cache every 30 seconds or so. The hanging can happen that frequently, even when I’m doing something as non-intensive as typing this response.

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Do you mean Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Network tab -> Offline storage? That’s the only cache adjustment I know of. I’ve raised it from 50MB to 200MB as a test.

But I doubt that’s it, unless FF is in the habit of pruning its cache every 30 seconds or so. The hanging can happen that frequently, even when I’m doing something as non-intensive as typing this response.

More likely lack of memory.
How much ram memory do you have installed.
What is your OS, 32bit or 64bit?

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4GB. 32bit. Sometimes I load it pretty heavily — e.g. with VMware running several OSs — but it does this even with just 8-10 apps running and < 2GB "physical memory in use" according to Task Manager.

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Probably related: it doesn’t usually do this, but today I noticed that Firefox was in some kind of periodic CPU-eating cycle. Every 20-22 seconds or so it spiked one CPU to near 100%, then returned to its normal low CPU usage. The brief lock-ups seemed to correspond with these CPU spikes. Which would make perfect sense, if something is spiking the CPU every 20 seconds — except it doesn’t usually show the spiking behavior (I’m 99.99% sure) but it *always* eventually does the lockups.

I generally run with at least 10-12 tabs open and I often leave FF up for days at a time. I’ve noticed that FF’s memory usage grows over time — it’s got a 675MB working set right now — and if I stop and restart it, the memory starts out at a reasonable level again. I think it also reduces the lockups for a while but I have a less-clear correlation on that.

It takes 40 seconds or more for firefox.exe to actually exit after I kill Firefox. As soon as I killed FF, the CPU spikes stopped in the CPU they’d been in. Some other spikes started in the other core, but not as regular. By the time firefox.exe fully exited, the spikes seemed to be gone from both cores.

When I started FF up again, the spikes were gone. So were the lockups. For now.

So something weird is up, but I sure can’t tell what it is…

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Probably related: it doesn’t usually do this, but today I noticed that Firefox was in some kind of periodic CPU-eating cycle. Every 20-22 seconds or so it spiked one CPU to near 100%, then returned to its normal low CPU usage. The brief lock-ups seemed to correspond with these CPU spikes.

I use FF 3.6.3 and have quite a number of extensions installed, and use lots of tabs (have 35 open now), and leave FF running for a day or two or longer. I usually only restart FF when there are add on updates to install (Tool->Addons, extensions tab: Find Updates). In my experience, FF used to have memory problems (memory consumption would grow and grown until FF crashed), but I haven’t had that problem for quite some time now. I traced the root cause of my memory problems back to extensions. Have you tried disabling all your extensions and then reenabling them one at a time while seeing how FF behaved? One extension that I used to like is Ghostery – but I have it disabled because of the problems that it caused. (I left it installed in case the developer published an update, so I could see it and install it).

Also, another thing to thing to check – since the spike is so regular – are any of your tabs set to Reload every xx seconds??

I generally run with at least 10-12 tabs open and I often leave FF up for days at a time. I’ve noticed that FF’s memory usage grows over time — it’s got a 675MB working set right now — and if I stop and restart it, the memory starts out at a reasonable level again. I think it also reduces the lockups for a while but I have a less-clear correlation on that.

It takes 40 seconds or more for firefox.exe to actually exit after I kill Firefox. As soon as I killed FF, the CPU spikes stopped in the CPU they’d been in. Some other spikes started in the other core, but not as regular. By the time firefox.exe fully exited, the spikes seemed to be gone from both cores.

Again, I would look toward the extensions that you are using. I have the SQLite Optimizer extension installed, and it runs a cleanup on the FF database on exit. It doesn’t take 40 seconds on my system, it’s more like 20-25 seconds.

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I use FF 3.6.3 and have quite a number of extensions installed, and use lots of tabs (have 35 open now), and leave FF running for a day or two or longer. … In my experience, FF used to have memory problems (memory consumption would grow and grown until FF crashed), but I haven’t had that problem for quite some time now. I traced the root cause of my memory problems back to extensions. Have you tried disabling all your extensions and then reenabling them one at a time while seeing how FF behaved?

Yes, I have. For months now I’ve only been running with Roboform and a few others — Java console, Adobe DLM, Tab Mix Plus, I think that was it. I just disabled everything except Roboform and Java, but I’ve done this before and it didn’t help. I’ve even disabled ALL add-ons, including Roboform (the Roboform toolbar was still there) and that didn’t help either. I hope this isn’t caused by Roboform. Maybe I should try completely uninstalling Roboform and see if that makes any difference. Except I don’t know my passwords.

It’s encouraging to hear that FF **CAN** run without eating up RAM and without the hangs, even with 35 tabs! (You’ve got me beat, I’m impressed!! ) But I’ve disabled just about everything and it’s not helping. I don’t know what else to try.

Also, another thing to thing to check – since the spike is so regular – are any of your tabs set to Reload every xx seconds??

Don’t think so, though I do usually have a finance.google.com stock chart open. But the spike is NOT normal behavior. It was just something unusual and noteworthy when I posted about it.

Again, I would look toward the extensions that you are using. I have the SQLite Optimizer extension installed, and it runs a cleanup on the FF database on exit. It doesn’t take 40 seconds on my system, it’s more like 20-25 seconds.

It literally takes 45-60 seconds or more for the firefox.exe process to exit, assuming it’s been running long enough to build up to 400-600MB of working set. I don’t know what’s eating up the memory, and I don’t know what’s running to gradually free the memory. Anybody know if there’s some way to find out??

Gary

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Could it be that FF cleans out all stored web pages, etc when you shut it down, and that when “I generally run with at least 10-12 tabs open and I often leave FF up for days at a time.” the browser cache continues to build? I’m a little more familiar with IE, but now use FF for about 90 % of my browsing. I have set FF up for private browsing so that each time I close it down, it automatically clears all the cached pages. I’m wondering if this would help your situation.

I know that shutting down windows allows maintenance processes to be completed. Closing IE does so as well. I believe that perhaps this could be a part of your problems.

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I had the exact same problem, FF would hang, spike usage to 99%, every few minutes.

I ended up disabling/removing all my plug ins, extensions, etc. Naturally I didn’t do 1 at a time or pay particular attention to what was there, but I had a lot of cute little things installed.

The only ones I have now are things like PDF, Flash, Java, just the bare minimum. That solved my problem

I have also heard it may be caused by a corrupt profile, so you may want to create a new one and see if the problem goes away.

It is such an annoying problem that I was ready to switch to chrome.

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I had the same problem, not only with FireFox, but several other apps. I would get (Not Responding) in the Windows (Vista) title bar. The problem went away when I removed McAfee VirusScan and replaced it with Microsoft Security Essentials. Maybe your antivirus software is hogging the CPU.

Pat

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I had the same problem, not only with FireFox, but several other apps. I would get (Not Responding) in the Windows (Vista) title bar. The problem went away when I removed McAfee VirusScan and replaced it with Microsoft Security Essentials. Maybe your antivirus software is hogging the CPU.

Pat

I have the same issue with Firefox frequently hanging with 100% CPU usage. In my case, anyway, it’s definitely not related to my anti-malware/spyware/virus software (which happens to be from Webroot). When I first noticed the hangs, I completely disabled my security software, thinking it might be the culprit. It made no difference at all; Firefox still hung and just as frequently.

–Larry

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I have that problem also. It seems to be that it happens when it’s accessing/updating the data in it’s SQLlite database files.

A lot of folks swear that if they turn off the options — Tools –> Options –> Security –> “Block reported attack sites” — and Tools –> Options –> Security –> “Block reported web forgeries” — that it helps alleviate this. It may have helped mine a little, but not to my liking.

I also have a lot of RSS feeds bookmarked, and they have to be periodically updated, which also causes access to these database files.

It seems that the people designing Firefox and it’s database file access haven’t heard of multi-threading, because they should be able to update these files in a separate thread and allow the rest of the browser functions to continue unabated.

Due to this problem I still use 3.0.19 on a netbook. The older versions didn’t use SQLlite database files and do not have this problem. I swear it’s going to cause a lot of defections if they don’t get this fixed.

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It seems that the people designing Firefox and it’s database file access haven’t heard of multi-threading, because they should be able to update these files in a separate thread and allow the rest of the browser functions to continue unabated.

They’ve heard of multi-threading. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Content_Processes

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I have this exact same problem and it drives me nuts.
I am convinced that it is based on extensions or plugins, as it only occurs on one of my Vista x64 systems, the one that I have loaded up with my favorite extensions.

It also causes pauses while I am typing, such as in this forum reply.

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There are several problems running around when you are viewing streaming videos in Flash format through Firefox. One is a well-documented Firefox “memory leak” in which they browser does not free up the RAM it is using as a memory cache. This problem increases with the number of tabs, the number of extensions, and the number of tabs with active content.

Another unrelated issue with videos hesitating or being jittery is Flash Player’s caching. You can adjust the Buffer Size in Flash Player to improve performance with video streams. But a lot depends on how fast the bits get downloaded from the server. You Tube is notorious for not delivering a smooth stream, and some ISPs are “prioritizing” or “throttling” certain types of data streams, including video streams. I find that Hulu.com suffers a lot less from this kind of degradation than YouTube, and no wonder, as some ISPs get paid by Comcast-NBC-Universal for prioity access to their bandwidth.

So, increase your Flash Player Buffer cache, and see if that helps. Unfortunately, the Firefox “memory leak” is more complicated, and no really good solutions have yet come to light. Maybe Firefox 4, due out later this year, will help the situation. And if more sites move from Flash to HTML5 (another new feature due out with Firefox 4), streaming video might work even better in the future.

-- rc primak

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Bob, that sounds like a likely match. Maybe FF4 will resolve this problem.

How do I increase the Flash buffer cache? I went to the settings dialog at the Adobe site and I see controls for how much storage a website can use &etc, but nothing for the buffer cache.

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There are several problems running around when you are viewing streaming videos in Flash format through Firefox. One is a well-documented Firefox “memory leak” in which they browser does not free up the RAM it is using as a memory cache. This problem increases with the number of tabs, the number of extensions, and the number of tabs with active content.

Well documented “memory leak” huh? I have Firefox 3.6.3 that I leave up and running for days at a time with no leaks, so how about a link to that “well documented memory leak”?

They’ve heard of multi-threading. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Content_Processes

Your link does not talk about multi-threading. It talks about multiple processes (yes, there is a difference).

But that’s not really my point. My comment was more sarcasm than anything. Of course they’ve heard of multi-threading, who hasn’t? But it just seems that they do not know how to implement it asynchronously.

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Well documented “memory leak” huh? I have Firefox 3.6.3 that I leave up and running for days at a time with no leaks, so how about a link to that “well documented memory leak”?

I can’t point to any documentation but I can definitely say it happens to me. My FF starts out (with 10-12 saved tabs) with a working set of about 150MB. Within a few days it’s 500MB or more.

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This freezing happens to me continually, too. Firefox was also using way too much memory. There certainly is a well-documented memory leak, so much that there are programs specifically to fix this. I installed Firefox Ultimate Optimizer (which I highly recommend if you have this problem), which reduced the usage from over 100,000k to under 10,000k according to Task Manager. It runs much better now, but it still freezes every half-minute or so. It doesn’t matter whether I have one window open or dozens. I have to quit Firefox and restart it, and then I get a few minutes of no freezing before it starts happening again. It only happens on one of my computers, Vista 16 bit.

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There certainly is a well-documented memory leak, so much that there are programs specifically to fix this.

You guys/gals should stop saying there is a “well documented memory leak” when you can’t provide links to validate your statement.

Go out and install this –> http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/ <– run it, clean up all your old and outdated apps and plugins and see if that helps.

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Did that (Secunia PSI) long ago. Other than a 9.x version of WinZip that’s listed as end-of-life, my system is clean. It’s *Firefox* that’s eating memory, not other apps.

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Did that (Secunia PSI) long ago. Other than a 9.x version of WinZip that’s listed as end-of-life, my system is clean. It’s *Firefox* that’s eating memory, not other apps.

I still think part of the solution is to periodically shut down to allow FF to perform a clean up maintenance. I do not have any of these problems with FF, but I do not leave it open for days at a time. If nothing else, I believe this consumes valuable resources by wasting energy. Perhaps my belief only, but I turn my PC’s off when not being used. Sorry to get off topic, this topic was discussed in detail in another thread.

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FWIW my PC (laptop) is always “off” when not in use. But I sleep it or hibernate it. Sleep takes a negligible amount of standby power and hibernate takes none. But it saves me having to re-establish my work environment — just hit the button and it’s ready to go.

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FWIW my PC (laptop) is always “off” when not in use. But I sleep it or hibernate it. Sleep takes a negligible amount of standby power and hibernate takes none. But it saves me having to re-establish my work environment — just hit the button and it’s ready to go.

You may not be understanding what shutting down in various ways does to Windows. When you Hibernate or Standby, Windows never really shuts down. This means that no Windows housekeeping or cache clearing takes place. These things can only happen when you actually turn off Windows completely, as in Reboot or Shut Down. Nothing short of this will refresh Windows and restore its pep and zip. Firefox does shut down when you close it, but Windows needs a full reboot or shut down and restart every once in a while. Failure to shut down Windows periodically can cause freezes or crashes. And updates require a reboot for a reason — they won’t be applied until Windows shuts down.

-- rc primak

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From discussion thread at: this forum (Not a Lounge Thread!)

How to increase buffer size on a mac [may also work on a PC]
How Can I Increase My Buffer

Right click in the screen of what is being played through Flash.
Menu down to settings.
Click on the folder icon.
Increase the buffer size.

This will make it take longer for the file to begin to play, but it will play with fewer pauses.

With Flash stream from Fancast, my problem was solved by right clicking on the video, click settings tab and increase storage space to 10mb. I have not had a pausing problem since.

By all indications, the end user has no control over the buffer size in Flash Player. There used to be internal controls and a slider, but not in recent versions. Some Web sites have player controls, and this is what the forum thread must be referring to. If the site or the video does not provide controls, you may be out of luck.

This is one of several issues which make me hope for a better alternative to Flash Player, perhaps something based on the newer HTML-5 protocols.

And from the Firefox Support Forums, here’s a thread running six pages about the Memory Leak problem. No concensus as to the cause.

-- rc primak

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By all indications, the end user has no control over the buffer size in Flash Player. There used to be internal controls and a slider, but not in recent versions. Some Web sites have player controls, and this is what the forum thread must be referring to. If the site or the video does not provide controls, you may be out of luck.

Macromedia (Adobe) Flash Player Settings Manager.I believe this is where you can change settings in Flash, including cache size, cookies, etc.

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Ah, OK. Yes, I’d already done that, though through the adobe.com site rather than by right-clicking on a Flash window. But I didn’t set it up to 10MB. I’ve set it there now and I’ll see if it does anything.

But I don’t expect it will — because this is not a Flash-based problem. It’s Firefox. I can be doing something as simple as typing this message into the post window, or scrolling a web page, and Firefox still has its little fits.

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Bob, yes I understand that. I generally end up rebooting at least once a week or so. Windows *ought* to be able to survive for 4-5 days without a reboot. (Ah for the good old days on Unix, when we ran servers for years at a time without reboots…)

Ted, yes, that’s where I changed my settings. But you can also right-click on a Flash player.

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I have had the same issue with FF freezing and the need to end the process in order to continue working. On a Mozilla thread I saw reference to AFOM, an add-on that reduced memory hog issues. While it provided some relief, I still had issues. I found Memory Fox, by the same author, installed it and FF is now working fine.

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T Hodge, my freezes aren’t of the “FF is dead, have to kill it and restart” variety. It just locks up for a second or so. It’s enough to be annoying when you’re typing, clicking links, or watching video, but it doesn’t totally lock up the browser.

I installed Memory Fox yesterday. So far it seems to be working very well. With 14 tabs open FF is only using about 280MB (working set), and it releases memory quickly when I close a tab. Usually by now it would be up around 450-500MB.

I’m not sure but I think the freezes are better too. They’re still happening but they’re much shorter, maybe 1/4 sec or so. It’s really only noticeable when playing a video. But I’ve only been running it for less than a day. I’ll let it run a few days and see if it stays like this. If so, I could live with it.

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My freezes probably weren’t of the locked up forever variety either, but my lack of patience and the fact that I exhausted all of my curse words prompted me to kill it. All seems good now.

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I think I spoke too soon. FF is now up to 345MB with only 11 open tabs. Furthermore I just watched a video and while the freezes were short, maybe 1/2 – 3/4 sec, they were happening every 8-10 seconds like clockwork.

I just tried deleting all tabs except one empty tab, and the memory use only went down to 330MB. The only addons running are Memory Fox, Roboform, and Java Console.

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How much memory do you have on your system and how much is in use? Perhaps your system is having to do paging to keep the active working set in memory.

I just counted my tabs – I have two FF windows open, one only has one tab but the other has 45 tabs (including this windowssecrets tab). FF is currently using 401 K. When FF used to have memory problems, the memory consumption would grow and grow, and FF would become unusable once it got over 1500 MB or so…

I have a 64-b Vista with 8 GB of memory installed, and only 4.3 GB in use, so have lots of free memory. I just read about Memory Fox — I think these sorts of tools are not really that useful, unless your system is quite short of memory.

If the freeze is happening when you’re watching a video, could it be that your net link is not really fast enough to deliver the video content without stuttering? (I know my internet connection is not fast enough – I usually push play, and then almost immediately pause, and then wait until the video has almost completed loaded into cache.)

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I have 32bit Vista so I’m limited to 4GB RAM, of which only about 3-3.2GB is available to Windows.

According to Task Manager my memory use peaks at about 2.2GB. Anything beyond that and the system grinds to a near-halt. I don’t know where the other 1GB is used but it doesn’t show in Task Manager.

(EDIT: I just added up the numbers in the “Working Set” column in Task Manager. They match fairly closely with the “memory usage” numbers on the Performance tab. I’m running around 2.3GB “in use” out of the 3.3GB the system SHOULD be able to see, and still my system is crawling. Which I believe is a separate issue from the Firefox freezes, since those happen even if the system isn’t loaded.)

No, the freezes are NOT due to network limitations. 1) When the video freezes, the audio continues playing just fine. 2) These freezes DO NOT happen only with Youtube &etc, it’s just one of the more annoying situations. I see little hangups while I’m just typing this message into the reply pane. Scrolling windows also show the freeze. If I click the mouse wheel and set up a smooth slow scroll, I see show stutters every 2-4 seconds and a longer pause every 10-12sec or so. (That may be worse since I installed Memory Fox.) **ALL** of FF freezes up, except, oddly, the audio in streaming video.

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May want to check this too, sorry if this is redundant.

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