392363 - Firefox gets slower the longer it is up...

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[L A Walsh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6

I open new URL in background on various news sites (google, bbc, reuters), even slashdot emails, I Drag'n'Drop stories onto "new" tabs, then press control-t to open another blank tab to drop another while others are still opening.

I had the 'luck' to have Firefox stay up and not crash for about a week, recently.  Over the week, opening a new URL got slower and slower and slower.  From being able to open several within a few seconds at the start, to it taking 7-15 seconds per URL open after up for a long period.  Eventually, I did a "restart w/all tabs" -- Immediately, the response time went back to "normal".

Seems like Firefox isn't going "house cleaning" somewhere, causing some list or another to get larget and larger.  It's not swapping -- just CPU pegged(bound).

Perhaps unrelated (or not), but I also notice a large delay when I first move my cursor over the "History" tab -- it takes about 5-10 seconds to do anything at all, but once it has shown the history, subsequent looks at the History panel come up quickly.  This only happens when I haven't looked at history for "a long time".  

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Geez...Don't close out FF after use -- leave at least 1 window up 
2. Use web-browswer to read lots of 'sites'.  .... (this is a lame summary
of steps to reproduce, I know...but I just started becoming aware of this
pattern. 
3. I had multiple windows open, each with multiple tabs...maybe minimum of 4 windows, to as many as 10, and tabs...varied by day, but max, maybe 20 or so...
Actual Results:  
Gradual degradation of UI interactivity.  This happened regardless of whether or not I closed "most" of the windows...so it wasn't any particular website. 


Expected Results:  
* - No decrease in performance based on time Firefox remains "up".  
* - Snappy GUI performance, even if I've opened 10 or more "articles" (as from a news site), in _background_, at same time; GUI should not be bogged down by background tasks (presuming no 'paging')

Have "several" (40) extensions enabled, but I probably wouldn't be using FF as much or as heavily as I do if it didn't have the extensions; 
if there was a way to "disable" extensions *without* restarting FF, could help debugging, "alot"....

----
Note on "severity"...when it happens, FF slowly becomes painfully unusable.
***However***, there is a work-around: Have "Restart Tabbed" extension installed.  Then user can occasionally restart FF when it starts to slow down.
(Why does that remind me of "windows"...if problem, then reboot...:-))

Comment 1

[Paul Schubert]

Reuters and reuters.co.uk and several sites are very slow the longer you use mozilla

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

do you still see thie problem with a current version (3.5) and started in safe mode?
see http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic+Troubleshooting#Troubleshoot_extensions_and_themes

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

=> incomplete
please reopen if more information becomes available per previous comments