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Firefox using most of my CPU and Memory on my Vista notebook

  • 4 replies
  • 7 have this problem
  • 9 views
  • Last reply by matthew1

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I have been working on this for almost a month now. I have changed settings in FF found in the settings using ""about commands used on this Forum. I did correct a memory leak with a patch from Microsoft that was accuring with SVSHOST.exe that was doing the same thing on a smaller scale. This is what happens, Before starting FF this is what the memory has in use 18%, and the 2.4 ghz CPU is using between 0 and 3% in short bursts. Next Exe FF and open up just one page at first. you will see that the CPU will jump up to 75% at first then settle back to about 18%. The memory is a different story however as it will start to climb higher and higher till about 10 minutes in the memory used by FF will keeps climbing until it stops at around 898,000 and the Page file starts to be accessed. This is 96% of the memory of this Notebook. I realize that my computer is older with its RAM being Maxed at only 1.26GB but FF's 898,724 of RAM is excessive. I have been running FF on this computer for over 10 years now and this issue seems to get worse year by year. There seems to be a memory leak somewhere that causes this as there are no themes or addons installed. I have done a fresh install of Vista and reset FF several times and no change. I remember when I first switched to FF years ago, It was because IE was using too many resources and slowing down the computer. FF at that time was much leaner and more responsive at that time but now it seems like FF has become bloated as well.

After 15 minutes the top 3 memory users are FF @ 898,724. Next will be SVCHOST with 32,656 and then the Malware Engine at 8,920. I have tried the new FF beta version with the same results.

Oh, one more thing, when FF memory get to the top the screen will Grey out and a message appears an states Fire Fox is not responding and the HD never stops. It must be trying to access the page file I guess.

I'm open to any suggestions.

I have been working on this for almost a month now. I have changed settings in FF found in the settings using ""about commands used on this Forum. I did correct a memory leak with a patch from Microsoft that was accuring with SVSHOST.exe that was doing the same thing on a smaller scale. This is what happens, Before starting FF this is what the memory has in use 18%, and the 2.4 ghz CPU is using between 0 and 3% in short bursts. Next Exe FF and open up just one page at first. you will see that the CPU will jump up to 75% at first then settle back to about 18%. The memory is a different story however as it will start to climb higher and higher till about 10 minutes in the memory used by FF will keeps climbing until it stops at around 898,000 and the Page file starts to be accessed. This is 96% of the memory of this Notebook. I realize that my computer is older with its RAM being Maxed at only 1.26GB but FF's 898,724 of RAM is excessive. I have been running FF on this computer for over 10 years now and this issue seems to get worse year by year. There seems to be a memory leak somewhere that causes this as there are no themes or addons installed. I have done a fresh install of Vista and reset FF several times and no change. I remember when I first switched to FF years ago, It was because IE was using too many resources and slowing down the computer. FF at that time was much leaner and more responsive at that time but now it seems like FF has become bloated as well. After 15 minutes the top 3 memory users are FF @ 898,724. Next will be SVCHOST with 32,656 and then the Malware Engine at 8,920. I have tried the new FF beta version with the same results. Oh, one more thing, when FF memory get to the top the screen will Grey out and a message appears an states Fire Fox is not responding and the HD never stops. It must be trying to access the page file I guess. I'm open to any suggestions.

All Replies (4)

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I am wondering if you disable hardware acceleration in Firefox if ther E would be improvements ?

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Thank for the suggestion. Playing by using or not useing the Hardware Acceleration really doesn't change anything. I forgot to mention that before FF taps out all the memory the CPU will stay between 65 and 80%. Also I have disabled all the flashplayer functions in FF and pulled away any Browser uses or Acrobat reader and made it stand alone. I thought that this might help but it didn't.

I see lots of other on the web have the same problems that are never solved and I hope that is not my demise as well.. Fred

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Matthew thank you for posting back with the results. I understand that the cpu performance did not change after troubleshooting the extensions, themes and hardware acceleration.

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Yes you are correct there is no noticeable change. There must be a simple reason for this. I have read many complaints on the web with the same issues and no remedy. I think my next step would be to replace FF with Chrome.

Thanks for trying.