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Firefox is a PIG!

O

obelix

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 20, 2004
99
0
Yes it is, a big fat hog. A mother of all that resembles the oinking and squandering of one's precious CPU and memory resources.

I love firefox I do, but I've been frustrated for months with abnormally high cpu usage especially when I have more than 3 or 4 tabs open.

I get close to 70% of my CPU usage going to firefox, and at least 175Mb or RAM or more are sometimes allocated to the browser. A real swine that's for sure.

I've got a 1.5Ghz Powerbook G4 with 1Gb of RAM and it's making my system perform like a dog.

Any ideas what could be causing this? Does anyone else have this experience with firefox? Is this something that they're even aware of or are fixing? I was hoping the problem would go away in 2.0 as it was present in 1.5... but no luck.

Ideas?
 
175 MB of RAM for Firefox is a snack compared to Safari, which regularly eats 500+ MB on my similar machine.

CPU usage should only spike transiently.
 
WildCowboy said:
175 MB of RAM for Firefox is a snack compared to Safari, which regularly eats 500+ MB on my similar machine.

CPU usage should only spike transiently.
Click to expand...


The thing is that it doesn't. It'll stay consistently pegged at 75% to 100% CPU usage if I have a number of tabs open. Especially if one of the pages contains flash. Safari has been much more minimalist for me.
 
Firefox is quickly becoming a heaping pile of poo as they add on features. Its got the same problems on every platform. Its slow to load, consumes way too much RAM, and leaks memory to boot! I have resorted to using it on an as needed basis.

Ex. My work Win PC
Current mem usage - 250 MB with 4 tabs open (MR, gmail, Sun JDK API info, work email) and the following plugins (TMP, Adblock, and del.icio.us)
 
Here's a tip I got not long ago and works well. Doesn't exactly save u resources, but it'll make it load faster.

Go to your Tool tab - Download and clear it out. It'll save you a few extra bounces when you use Firefox initially.
 
I have the same problem and still haven't found a solution to it yet.

After firefox has been running for a while and I quite a few tabs open the CPU usage goes through the roof. What I do to get around it is to use the 'bookmark all tabs' feature in Firefox. Then I close down and restart firefox. Now go to the folder that you saved all the bookmarks in and open them all. This will put you back to where you were before, except with low CPU load and minimum ram usage.
 
The only thing I use Firefox for is websites Safari refuses to load. I wish Safari could load every website, if Firefox can do it, why can't Safari? Why isnt there constant fixes for Safari until 99% of sites will load on it?

Come on Apple, it should "Just Work"!!!
 
Camino

I use camino as well as Safari.
Safari can't handle some websites like deminoid.com and pricegrabber.com so I use Camino for them.
Camino also works for my TiddlyWiki page.
http://www.caminobrowser.org/ - Check it out I find it way better then Firefox.:D
 
Firefox spikes to ~74% of my CPU then drops to a mere ~55%
:eek:
But is loads just about everything I need, so I am stuck with it.
 
no comment on RAM, u know 175MB is much better than others.
if your cpu consitantly goes up to 75% and stay there, go delete/rename your profile folder.
 
I have exactly the same set-up and problem as obelix. Firefox is the only app on my system that I have to quit after use.
 
Well emptying out my cache for some odd reason seems to have fixed some of the issue. It's sitting at about 30% at the moment. I tried out Camino yesterday, and even contemplated going back to Safari but I love my web developer plugins too much and I use them all the time. Camino has no real web developer extensions to speak of, and Safari is great if you're just browsing the web, but again no extensions.

So now I'm stuck with a slow *ss browser because it's the only thing that has decent developer extensions. I wish Camino could run FF extensions, it seems like a much more "mac" minded product. For some odd reason when I use FF it seems like a PC in a Mac world. Clunky.
 
joshysquashy said:
The only thing I use Firefox for is websites Safari refuses to load. I wish Safari could load every website, if Firefox can do it, why can't Safari? Why isnt there constant fixes for Safari until 99% of sites will load on it?

Come on Apple, it should "Just Work"!!!
Click to expand...

A lot of times, it's the web developers who do "browser checks" and simply "filter out" the "unknown browsers" instead of coding to W3C standards.

"MSIE or FireFox required" isn't better than "MSIE required". If people code to W3C standards, then they only need to patch their code for the various MSIE versions.
 
Firefox's "memory leak" is a feature of caching pages.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009749.html
What I think many people are talking about however with Firefox 1.5 is not really a memory leak at all. It is in fact a feature.

To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited < 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last few session history entries. This can be a lot of data. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web.

For those who remain concerned, here's how the feature works. Firefox has a preference browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers which by default is set to -1. When set to this value, Firefox calculates the amount of memory in the system, according to this breakdown:
RAM Number of Cached Pages
32MB 0
64MB 1
128MB 2
256MB 3
512MB 5
1GB 8
2GB 8
4GB 8

(reference: nsSHistory.cpp)

No more than 8 pages are ever cached in this fashion, by default. If you set this preference to another value, e.g. 25, 25 pages will be cached. You can set it to 0 to disable the feature, but your page load performance will suffer.
Click to expand...

Here's a way to fix it.
Fixing Firefox's memory leak

Posted on 01/24/2005 3:04:40 PM PST by Terpfen

I noticed a few Firefox threads here have people complaining about how much memory Firefox takes up. This is a known memory leak, and the Mozilla guys haven't gotten around to fixing it for whatever reason. But there's no reason your Firefox should take up 70,000K in memory, so here's how to fix that memory leak and keep Firefox from bloating up.

1. Open a new tab. Type "about:config" without quotes into the address bar and hit enter/click Go.

2. Right-click anywhere, select New, then Integer. In the dialog prompt that appears, type:

browser.cache.memory.capacity

3. Click OK. Another dialog prompt will appear. This is where you decide how much memory to allocate to Firefox. This depends on how much RAM your computer has, but generally you don't want to allocate too little (under 8MB), but if you allocate too much, you might as well not do this. A good recommended setting is 16MB. If you want 16MB, enter this value into the dialog prompt:

16384

(Why 16384 instead of 16000? Because computers use base-12 counting. Thus 16 megabytes = 16384 bytes. Likewise, if you want to double that and allocate 32MB, you'd enter 32768.)

4. Click OK to close the dialog box, then close all instances of Firefox and restart. If your Firefox still uses the same amount of memory, give it a few minutes and it should slowly clear up. If that fails, try a system reboot.

Hope I did a service to some FReepers today.
Click to expand...

Any Gecko-based browser has this flaw because it's a part of the Gecko rendering engine AFAIK. This includes Mozilla, Firefox, Camino and Netscape (AOL).
 
I totally agree. I used to love firefox and shouted that I loved it over IE and the like to family and friends. But now, I despise it. they have tried to pack so much into the app itself that it does take forever to load on startup, and does take a lot to run once it is up. I still have a .dmg of firefox 1.5 which I am holding onto for dear life because if I loose it, then I don't believe it will be found again. I have the .dmg, not the program in my application folder.
 
I use FireFox on both my iMac and Powerbook and haven't had any problems.


I haven't had any problems with the Windows version either. Except at work, I have Portable Firefox installed on my network drive, and it's slow to load, but I think that's because a 100mbit network is a lot slower compared to a local hard drive
 
...a big fat hog...oinking...a real swine that's for sure...perform like a dog.
Click to expand...
i love all the animal metaphors.

i also was using firefox. i switched to mac in september and was more comfortable with firefox's interface and capabilities than i was with safari.
however, in the last month, i grew frustrated having to wait for the beachball to go away and the firefox icon to stop bouncing every time i loaded it (totally absurd on my mbp 2.16ghz!), not to mention the infrequent-but-still-sometimes crashes of the browser.
so i started using safari. it is more stable and a hell of a lot faster; but man oh man does it ever have trouble with some websites (ie, gmail is virtually unusable in safari for me), and it also is a lot more finicky in terms of adding and manipulating bookmarks and the bookmarks bar. (plus i love the ease of adding search engines to firefox)....

so i miss its functions, but i do not miss waiting or the crashing.
 
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