Firefox excessive CPU usage on Ubuntu 13.04
I have been a faithful Firefox user since Firebird version 0.6. But I have unfortunately had to abandon Firefox in favor of Chromium on my primary Desktop system. I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 13.04 and, since that time, I have observed Firefox consuming inordinate amounts of CPU time, routinely pegging CPU usage to 100% or more (on a dual processor). I have expended several days of research and diagnosis but without success. I have tried the usual disabling of plug-ins, and even completely deleted my Firefox profile (~/.mozilla), but the performance problems persist. I am curious if any other Firefox/Ubuntu users have run into this problem and have a solution. I really want to return to Firefox, but more importantly I need to return to productivity, thus forcing me to abandon Firefox at least for the short term. Can anyone provide any insight?
Wszystkie odpowiedzi (7)
Hello,
Try disabling graphics hardware acceleration. Since this feature was added to Firefox, it has gradually improved, but there still are a few glitches.
You might need to restart Firefox in order for this to take effect, so save all work first (e.g., mail you are composing, online documents you're editing, etc.).
Then perform these steps:
- Click the orange Firefox button at the top left, then select the "Options" button, or, if there is no Firefox button at the top, go to Tools > Options.
- In the Firefox options window click the Advanced tab, then select "General".
- In the settings list, you should find the Use hardware acceleration when available checkbox. Uncheck this checkbox.
- Now, restart Firefox and see if the problems persist.
Additionally, please check for updates for your graphics driver by following the steps mentioned in the following Knowledge base articles:
_________________________________________________________________________
Yes, disabling hardware acceleration brought the performance back to expected and acceptable levels. As an additional note, I do have NVIDIA graphics, and drivers for NVIDIA for Ubuntu have always had issues. Unfortunately, the drivers are proprietary, and not open source.
As an additional note, although the suggestion given improved performance, after a day or two the performance began to degrade again. In fact, system performance overall was very bad, not just while using Firefox.
I have finally found the root cause of the problem. As much as I hate to admit it, the problem was dust. I took the computer apart and found that the heat sink was caked with dust. After a good cleaning, the system returned to peak performance.
Unfortunately, we sometimes don't look in the right place to find the answer. This was such a case.
Its good that you found the cause of your problem and fixed it, if you'd like to you can turn Hardware acceleration back on.
i have resolved in:extension-> disable ubunu extension.
too cpu usage to view empty web page (foolder list)
Waka_Flocka_Flame, just so you are aware as the OP is using Linux and not Windows. With Firefox on Linux it is Edit -> Preferences (due to Gnome HIG) and not Tools->Options.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Menu_differences_in_Windows,_Linux,_and_Mac
Disabling graphics driver acceleration resolved my problem, but it required restart of OS, without that, performance was the same.
I measured how many seconds it takes to drop CPU usage below 10%. Initially it took about 21 seconds, after restart 1-2, sometime jumping up for a moment, but never over 10 seconds to drop below 10% of CPU usage.
Thanks for the advice.