604538 - Processor peaks when Firefox starts

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[AbbY]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10

I am running Windows 7 x64 with i7 processor on HP Pavilion dv6 pc with 8GB RAM. Whenever I launch FIREFOX, my processor immediately kicks in and doesn't stop until I close the browser. Monitoring the Max Frequency in the Resource Monitor tab, it shows 105% for all the duration Firefox stays open and as soon as I close it, it drops to 90% or below. This overclocking makes my processor really-really HOTTT... Is there a fix to this problem!?

I have all the Windows 7 patches installed on the system.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Launch Firefox on i7 core processor
2. Start normal browsing (Youtube/Hulu/CNN/BBC)
3. Watch the CPU/Max Frequency on "Resource Monitor" & also keep an ear for how the processor fan responds.
Actual Results:  
Technically, I guess nothing should happen as that's considered normal usage.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Hulu and youtube contain heavy flash "applets" and it's pretty normal that such flash videos need CPU power.
You can only try http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode to be sure that no Firefox extension is using more CPU power than necessary.

Comment 2

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Also, please try loading Firefox to a blank page (about:blank) and see whether the CPU usage is still high.

Comment 3

[AbbY]

Hello,

Yes, the processor peaks even on a blank page. But that spike is less when compared to the browsing spike. Even as simple as a google search revs up my processor fan. 

Regards to flash applets needing high CPU power, I can understand, but I have a 1 G NVDIA GPU on my system to handle that :-/

Also, in SAFEMODE my processor is spiking for google search. 

Any work arounds!?

Comment 4

[Andreas Eibach]

You're on 3.6.10 ?

Well, I wonder if the "great" plugin container concept was already built in this version.

If you find a plugin-container.exe in your Task Manager, try to set dom.ipc.plugins.enabled to FALSE in about:config.
This "fixed" it for me, because plugin container eats resources like mad in no time.

Comment 5

[AbbY]

Hello and apologies for this late response. As asked, I did try to use Mozilla in SAFE MODE and also ensured that all addons are disabled. But the problem persists. My processor starts overclocking the moment I launch Mozilla and falls back to normal as soon as I close it. 

Also as asked, I did disable dom.ipc.plugins.enabled, but nothing yet.

I recently updated my Mozilla version to 3.6.11.

Thanks,
Arindam

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Reporter, can you still reproduce using a current version?
If no, please set status to RESOLVED and resolution to WORKSFORME.
If yes, please provide updated information.

Comment 7

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard