The FF Hiccup

Half second hang becoming annoying

[rocknbil]

Prompted by kaled's statement in this thread [webmasterworld.com]:

To anyone whose copy of Firefox freezes for 1-2 seconds every 10-20 seconds, just revert back to the older version.

An additional annoyance, as you type into form fields, it hangs there too, with your type magically appearing after the hiccup.

Could not locate the original thread he mentions, but using 3.6 here, and it's becoming annoying. It's gotten worse in 3.6, before I waste another half day doing the usual - disconnect this, disable that, reboot, cross fingers, rinse and repeat - was wondering if anyone had any resources to get at the root of this. I don't really want to roll back and cancel more nagware alerts . . .

XP Pro SP 3

2.8 Ghz, 2 GB RAM

FF 3.6

Java Console 6.0.11 (note: Just noticed a bunch of other J.C's were installed and active, will report back if removing these makes a diff)

AVG S.S. 8.5.0.429

FireBug 1.5

MS .Net assistant

Oldbar 1.2

YSlow 2.04

Dust Me and Live HTTP Headers disabled, not compatible with 3.6 (boo hoo, I miss them, haven't checked on these yet.)

You can probably see why I don't want to discombooberate things until I see if someone has a direction to go.

[jdMorgan]

Not seeing any hickups here on a machine that is substantailly older/less powerful that yours.

Uninstall all those JRE's but the latest -- 6u18, I believe. The newer Java updaters will do this clean-up automatically, but if you've already got a bunch of oldies, you'll probably have to remove them manully, and then go find their 'leftover' directories in "Program Files" and under your account in "Documents and Settings."

Other than disabling all of those add-ons unless you're actually using them, I'd suggest firing up the Task Manager, sorting the display by CPU usage, and watching it to see what the machine is doing during those 'lags'- Whenever I've seem 'pauses' and lags, it's always been some program updating, my anti-virus scanning something, or the Windows Update client or the Windows Help Center updater running. But in these cases, *all* programs lag and stutter, not just FF.

Dunno if any of this will help... It's one of those "I can't see the problem here" situations for me, I'm afraid.

BTW Live HTTP Headers works fine under FF3.6, but you'll need yet another add-on --the "Add-on Compatibility Reporter"-- to enable it and to disable the nags about it. Hopefully, the authors will just bump the compatibility number and kick out an updated release soon.

Jim

[kaled]

Rocknbil,
Other than XP Pro SP3, 2GB ram and AVG (version 9.0 in my case) there are no similarities to my system, so you can rule out most of what's on your list.

My theory is that it's related to crash-recovery, i.e. every so often, Firefox saves its status and that's what's causing the pause - but that's a theory that I cannot prove. I played with disabling certain features in about:config but could not eliminate the problem.

Sometimes I wonder if Firefox programmers actually use their creation - if they did, perhaps these problems would be sorted out. Of course, there is the old saying "You get what you pay for".

Kaled.

[rocknbil]

Thank you both, since removing the old Java add ons it seems to have settled down, but I don't know that it's related (or that it isn't.) As you probably know as it gets left open for days it starts to climb up in memory and hiccup again.

<Me so bad . . . I often go weeks without a reboot, talk about always on . . .>

One thing I do notice, and it did it today: when it starts to really hog it up, I'll exit FF and wait a few seconds, then try to restart it and it says it's already running. Go to Processes and sure enough, it's still there eating up 300+ K. Odd. I waited two minutes or so to see if it let go on it's own, thinking it was doing a temporary file cleanup or something. It didn't, I had to kill the process.

I have been watching the task manager. When it starts doing it really bad, FF spikes to 90%+ CPU, over 300K memory; as I type, it's slurping up around 170. Usually if Adobe (or other mfg.) is intruding and forcing a download, I can spot it. This is just that thing that FF does when it snowballs, I think.

[rocknbil]

Update: open for two days after the above. Seems to be fine at 200K or under, random hiccups but not enough to annoy. Today it spiked up to 275 K and th er e it g oes a gai n . . . restart FF, back to "sorta OK."

This keeps up and I'm going to have to dump my favorite browser, I have enough things that annoy me in life. :-P

[JAB Creations]

Consider starting a new profile and exporting your bookmarks from the old one. I have profiles for 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7 (nightly builds).

- John

"C:\MEDIA\INTERNET\Mozilla Firefox 3.6\firefox.exe" -no-remote -ProfileManager

[Hoople]

AVG runs an in browser Plug-In that could be a part of this.

When I upgraded AVG from 8.5 to 9.0 my resource consumption dropped slightly to significantly, depending on page content.

My machine is an older XP SP3 with 1gb memory.

[kaled]

I use AVG but the link scanner is not even installed and I have no AVG plugins or extensions.

[tangor]

Running the latest FF. Have never had a problem. Ever. Don't run as many add ons and the ones I do run are pretty simple (NoScript, Download Helper, Http Headers). I also shut down and restart every day and rarely have more than two tabs open at any time. Works perfectly so far. And run AVG, too. Task Manager rarely reports more than 130k...

Chalk this up as different strokes for different folks...

[rocknbil]

I also shut down and restart every day

Alas . . . . with my schedule it can run for weeks at a time . . . it's sounding more and more like a progressive thing. I've been experimenting and just closing down FF when it gets wonky seems to help. A lot.

and rarely have more than two tabs open at any time.

I would die. :-) At any given moment, 8-12 tabs, and have 4-6 apps open at all times - mail, editor, FF, PS, Flash . . . . major multitasking here.