1360366 - FireFox V53.0 just grinds to a halt

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[david]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Build ID: 20170413192749

Steps to reproduce:

Run FireFox (I am using V53.0 32-bit on Windows 10) with several windows and tabs open from previous session.


Actual results:

CPU usage by FireFox is at about 52% and memory used by the program is at ~650MB (out of 4GB) so it is neither CPU-, nor memory-bound
Works fine for a while, and then starts to take longer and longer to respond, until the point where it simply stops.  This can take anything from a few minutes to an hour to cease responding.  If I catch it soon enough, then using File-->Exit and restarting gets me back to a working position - for a while - and then the same slowing down and grinding to a halt occurs.  If I am not on the ball, then the only way to proceed is to kill the process from the Task Manager and restart.
Watching YouTube videos or downloading large files _appear_ to make the slowing down happen sooner although this could be a misconception.
This performance issue arose initially with V51.0.


Expected results:

FireFox should remain active and responsive even if left open for extended periods of time.  Earlier versions have remained active for several days without any deterioration in response.

Comment 1

[u554753]

Hi David,

Thanks for reporting this issue. Can you send us a Performance Profile of the issue? Instructions on how to do that can be followed here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance/Reporting_a_Performance_Problem

Comment 2

[david]

Attachment: Gecko Profiler log (compressed)

Comment 3

[david]

I installed Nightly "55.0a1 (2017-05-02) (32-bit)" and have run it using the same set of windows and tabs which I have been using previously with FireFox.  Having run Nightly for about an hour, playing several YouTube videos and loading a number of other web pages, I have not noticed any slowing down in the performance of the software.  I have attached the log from the Performance Profile, although I am not sure that this will show anything useful at this time.  I will continue and leave the program running and rerun more tests tomorrow.
I noticed that this version of Nightly is using significantly less CPU than I have been using with FireFox V53.0, V52.0 and V51.0 which invariably ran at somewhere around 56% CPU.  Nightly is running consistently with between 6% and 15% CPU - again, for reference, using the same set of windows and tabs as I have been using with FireFox.
Could something that has been causing the performance issue perhaps already have been addressed?

Comment 4

[david]

I left it running overnight and it was still working this morning.  I have updated to Nightly 55.0a1 (2017-05-03) (32-bit) and have run as many YouTube videos as I have had the time to do, with the result that there has been no noticeable degradation in performance.

I did notice in Task Manager that there are several background Nightly tasks running (five to be precise) as well as the main one in the foreground.  I have eight Nightly windows open.  A snapshot of the percentage CPU usage of each task is:
Foreground task: 11.9%
Background tasks: 11.6%, 4.4%, 0.8% 0.3% and 12.1% (I realise that this information is probably of no use whatsoever, but as the main program has not displayed the performance issue that FireFox has been demonstrating, I wanted to provide something at least.)

Comment 5

[david]

I went away for a few days leaving Nightly 55.0a1 (2017-05-03) (32-bit) running and it was still fine upon my return yesterday.
Today, I have been running FireFox 53.0 (32-bit) and it has for the most part been running OK.  The only problem I have experienced is that it lost its plot with the graphics - tabs all went blank so I had to restart.  I had a dialog up to upgrade to 53.0.2 I think it was, so I will update to that in a short while.