Firefox not responding problems, need help.

[coolred]

Here recently if I leave firefox open and don't use it for a while, when I come back to it, it is frozen and task manager says it is not responding. I have to close the process and restart in order for it to continue working. Its not using more then the normal amount of ram and I have dual Xeons, which are only being 25% utilized at most at the times. So I don't think its a resource issue, what else should i consider? I have ran adaware and AVG antivirus which both found nothing.

 

[coolred]

Any help?

 

[n0cmonkey]

"For a while" means what roughly?

I'll install firefox the next time I see my Windows system and see what happens.

 

[coolred]

Its random, sometimes it could be for a few minutes, other times for hours. But it doesn't freeze every time I leave it for a while. Most of the time, but not every time. I just downloaded the new 1.02 firefox and still have the problem.

 

[AristoV300]

Sorry I have never encountered that problem. I leave it open and left my computer for several hours and never had it not respond.

 

[Netflyer]

If I have this kind of problem I will try uninstall and reinstall first. It is not necessary to figure out a run time error

 

[Kappo]

I have the issue of it just minimizing REALLY slowly after having it open and unused for a few hours. After that it seems really laggy when I tab through and minimize/maximize, and a restart of Firefox always fixes the issue.

 

[CTho9305]

If it's unused for hours, windows moves it out of ram and into the swap file. For some reason, Mozilla and Firefox both come back into memory significantly slower than other applications. I don't know if the developers know why that is.

 

[coolred]

I am thinking maybe it has a memory leak. I have 2 windows open, one with 12 tabs, and one with 27. I know thats a lot but it has never been a problem before. I have closed everything I can think of that may be helping to cause the problem, but no go. When I originally start a FF, it spikes to about 150,000K memory usage, if I minimize it it drops to like 50,000K or so, but then just continually climbs, I will check to see how high it goes.

 

[CTho9305]

I am thinking maybe it has a memory leak. I have 2 windows open, one with 12 tabs, and one with 27. I know thats a lot but it has never been a problem before. I have closed everything I can think of that may be helping to cause the problem, but no go. When I originally start a FF, it spikes to about 150,000K memory usage, if I minimize it it drops to like 50,000K or so, but then just continually climbs, I will check to see how high it goes.

There are various known memory leaks in Mozilla/Firefox. For example, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=128978 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=288761 . However, all memory leaks I'm aware of are tiny leaks. The contents of pages you have open do affect memory usage - go to about:cache (put that in the URL bar) and look what's in your memory cache. As you close tabs and windows, it usually frees up memory. Entries corresponding to currently open pages cannot be avoided.

If you do find a reliable way to get memory usage to increase and never drop again as you close windows and tabs, see if it still exists in a nightly trunk build from ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk and if so, search bugzilla for bugs that have the "mlk" keyword set or mention leak in the summary. Note that you're going to get a HUGE number of mostly bogus results (largely due to users who scream "memory leak!" at the first sign of any memory usage at all), but if your leak really hasn't been filed, and you have good steps to reproduce, file the bug.

Also note that task manager's reported numbers for memory use aren't particularly good indicators of actual memory usage - see various posts by Nothinman in other threads for details.

 

[mechBgon]

For some reason, Mozilla and Firefox both come back into memory significantly slower than other applications. I don't know if the developers know why that is.

Antivirus software perhaps. I know where I work, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i dislikes Firefox something fierce. Are there some .jar files involved, because those and .chm's are VS Enterprise's favorite thing to chew and chew and chew on before clearing them for use.

Firefox launch times on a 566MHz Celeron2 with 256MB of RAM, Win2000 Pro and fully-armed VS Enterprise 8.0i typically range from 30 to 45 seconds just to get the window on-screen. I think it would be smart if the FF developers at least have it put up a splash screen a la Netscape, so the employee knows that it's trying to get launched.

 

[CTho9305]

I think it would be smart if the FF developers at least have it put up a splash screen a la Netscape, so the employee knows that it's trying to get launched.

They specifically removed splash screens, to encourage themselves to get it to start faster (or something along those lines). I've asked. That's the same reason they ditched quicklaunch. The Mozilla suite community project devs like the splash screen though, so we're keeping it for future suite releases 🙂. (by the way, tests by various people show the same startup time for suite vs firefox, which is nice 🙂)

 

[coolred]

I think I found the problem, I believe it was having an issue with the gmail notifier extension. I removed it and it has yet to freeze again.

 

[coolred]

Umm forget what I said, i still froze even after removing gmail notifier, I will try removing more extensions to see if that helps. Since those are the only changes I have made that I can think of that may cause this.

I also was looking at it more, not sure how I missed this earlier, but when it freezes, it is always registering 25% CPU utilization. During normal running it uses less then 5%. The 25% sound significat since I am running dual hyperthreading Xeons, so 25% is basiclly like freezing one whole processor, that is if you think of the cpus as 4 seperate CPU's. But oddly enough it is using like 12-13% on 2 seperate processors. Not sure if they are virtual or the real ones.