Re: [gentoo-user] Memory/CPU usage in recent versions of Firefox

[james]

On 06/14/17 14:42, Mick wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 Jun 2017 13:10:16 Grant Edwards wrote:
>> Starting a few months back, I've noticed that on some of my machines,
>> Firefox has started to use rediculous amounts of CPU and memory. It
>> will burn 100% of a CPU for minutes at a time while apparently doing
>> nothing.  Opening 2-3 tabs will use up 1-2 GB of RAM.  Doing the same
>> thing thing in Chrome uses 0% CPU (once pages are rendered) and less
>> that 1/10 the RAM.
>>
>> I've got the same version of Firefox with the same set of extensions
>> on other machines that don't seem to have issues.
>>
>> Is there any useful troubleshooting one can do (e.g. uninstalling
>> extensions one at a time)?  Or is it finally time to give up on
>> Firefox?
> 
> It may be hardware acceleration trouble.  What video card are you using?  I 
> have noticed hard lock ups on FF, LibreOffice and even Kmail (more rare) on 
> two different systems with AMD/Radeon video cards.  The keyboard becomes 
> totally unresponsive.  This has started since the last Xorg/Mesa update, but 
> I 
> haven't had the time to look into it.  The logs do not show anything 
> meaningful.  FF was particularly troublesome on version 45.8.0, but with 
> 52.1.0-r1 seems to have settled down.

I have one system with a fanless radeon card ::
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
[AMD/ATI] Cape Verde PRO [Radeon HD 7750/8740 / R7 250E]


that goes blank, locks keyboard and requires a hard system reset,
sporadically.Sometimes months, sometimes a few days. It always comes
back fine after reboot. Numerous memory scans finds nothing wrong with
ram. It locks up sporadically, unrelated to load/hardware usage, neither
specific to an application. I suspect the video driver and associated
codes, but have not found it.  Then again, I have not looked in a robust
manner. If you look at Phoronix, there is heavy work on most aspects of
the greater AMD/radeon area of linux.


I just hope some more modern fanless video cards (radeon) become
available, as what I use is old. I was/am preparing to work on
radeontop. Some folks boot windows and use vendor supplied diagnostic
tools when a gremlin appears in the radeon hardware. My card(s) are so
old, I'm waiting on newer fanless cards (have not looked lately to see
what's is out there that is fanless, radeon and priced lower). All in
all, I love radeon/AMD video cards; ymmv.


radeontop needs tlc, so anyone could jump my efforts as that ebuild/code
needs some updates. I'm not sure when I'll get to (proxy) fix it up;
but it monitors the radeon cards by categories of GPU/resource
utilization, if certain apps are killing your video/system. Not sure
what new features are in the newer versions. I do have a plethora of
older radeon cards to test, if somebody wanted to proxy maintain
radeontop, as I'm not sure when I'll get to it.


https://github.com/clbr/radeontop


Bad year for this old fart, in several domains


hth,
James

Re: [gentoo-user] Memory/CPU usage in recent versions of Firefox

[Mick]

On Wednesday 14 Jun 2017 13:10:16 Grant Edwards wrote:
> Starting a few months back, I've noticed that on some of my machines,
> Firefox has started to use rediculous amounts of CPU and memory. It
> will burn 100% of a CPU for minutes at a time while apparently doing
> nothing.  Opening 2-3 tabs will use up 1-2 GB of RAM.  Doing the same
> thing thing in Chrome uses 0% CPU (once pages are rendered) and less
> that 1/10 the RAM.
> 
> I've got the same version of Firefox with the same set of extensions
> on other machines that don't seem to have issues.
> 
> Is there any useful troubleshooting one can do (e.g. uninstalling
> extensions one at a time)?  Or is it finally time to give up on
> Firefox?

It may be hardware acceleration trouble.  What video card are you using?  I 
have noticed hard lock ups on FF, LibreOffice and even Kmail (more rare) on 
two different systems with AMD/Radeon video cards.  The keyboard becomes 
totally unresponsive.  This has started since the last Xorg/Mesa update, but I 
haven't had the time to look into it.  The logs do not show anything 
meaningful.  FF was particularly troublesome on version 45.8.0, but with 
52.1.0-r1 seems to have settled down.

-- 
Regards,
Mick

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Re: [gentoo-user] Memory/CPU usage in recent versions of Firefox

[Dale]

Grant Edwards wrote:
> Starting a few months back, I've noticed that on some of my machines,
> Firefox has started to use rediculous amounts of CPU and memory. It
> will burn 100% of a CPU for minutes at a time while apparently doing
> nothing.  Opening 2-3 tabs will use up 1-2 GB of RAM.  Doing the same
> thing thing in Chrome uses 0% CPU (once pages are rendered) and less
> that 1/10 the RAM.
>
> I've got the same version of Firefox with the same set of extensions
> on other machines that don't seem to have issues.
>
> Is there any useful troubleshooting one can do (e.g. uninstalling
> extensions one at a time)?  Or is it finally time to give up on
> Firefox?
>

I would start here:  about:about  There you should have these: 

about:addons-memory

about:memory

about:performance

One of those may shed some light or lead to something.  I hope anyway. 
In the past, I've found that sometimes two add-ons can clash and one or
the other has to be disabled to correct this until that add-on is fixed.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Memory/CPU usage in recent versions of Firefox

[Radoje Stojisic]

Which version of Firefox do you use? The latest version 54 has multi processor 
architecture included. Otherwise use about:performance the check what uses the 
most RAM. 



Am 14. Juni 2017 15:10:16 MESZ schrieb Grant Edwards 
:
>Starting a few months back, I've noticed that on some of my machines,
>Firefox has started to use rediculous amounts of CPU and memory. It
>will burn 100% of a CPU for minutes at a time while apparently doing
>nothing.  Opening 2-3 tabs will use up 1-2 GB of RAM.  Doing the same
>thing thing in Chrome uses 0% CPU (once pages are rendered) and less
>that 1/10 the RAM.
>
>I've got the same version of Firefox with the same set of extensions
>on other machines that don't seem to have issues.
>
>Is there any useful troubleshooting one can do (e.g. uninstalling
>extensions one at a time)?  Or is it finally time to give up on
>Firefox?
>
>-- 
>Grant Edwards   grant.b.edwardsYow! Are you still
>an
>  at   ALCOHOLIC?
>  gmail.com

Greetings 
Radi 

Re: [gentoo-user] Memory/CPU usage in recent versions of Firefox

[R0b0t1]

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 8:10 AM, Grant Edwards
 wrote:
> Starting a few months back, I've noticed that on some of my machines,
> Firefox has started to use rediculous amounts of CPU and memory. It
> will burn 100% of a CPU for minutes at a time while apparently doing
> nothing.  Opening 2-3 tabs will use up 1-2 GB of RAM.  Doing the same
> thing thing in Chrome uses 0% CPU (once pages are rendered) and less
> that 1/10 the RAM.
>

You should pay attention to which web pages you are visiting because
this is almost always due to misbehaving JavaScript. You can use
`htop` to display custom thread names and Firefox will name the
threads so that you can tell which ones are running the JavaScript
engine.

I'm using 500MB or so with a few pages open. 1-2GB seems normal. Be
sure that the resource usage statistics mean what you think they mean.

I did recently have an issue where a Firefox instance on Windows that
had been running for a month or so started to become unresponsive, but
restarting it fixed it.

> I've got the same version of Firefox with the same set of extensions
> on other machines that don't seem to have issues.
>
> Is there any useful troubleshooting one can do (e.g. uninstalling
> extensions one at a time)?  Or is it finally time to give up on
> Firefox?
>

You can "refresh firefox"
(https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings)
which removes your profile, its addons, and all associated settings.
This is faster than reinstalling it and from what I can tell
accomplishes the same thing.

For the longest time Firefox was far better than Chromium at resource
usage simply due to how Chromium is structured. Since that can't
really change I am wary to say Firefox is worse in that regard. If
anything has happened it seems like there is a new bug or a regression
that you could report.

R0b0t1.