693525 - Since I installed Firefox 7.1, when I try to open a webpage in Firefox, it frequently spins its wheels endlessly, never fully loading the page and chewing up MASSIVE amounts of CPUs, and tying up my whole computer.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[csmisson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1
Build ID: 20110928134238

Steps to reproduce:

With Firefox already open on my homepage, I tried to open an additional page.


Actual results:

The new page, and any subsequent new pages, just spin endlessly, never actually loading.  This happens almost all the time now, and it seems to have started right after I installed Firefox 7.1.  When it does this, it chews up massive amounts of CPUs and locks up my entire computer.


Expected results:

The webpages should just load, as they always have before, and as they still do on Internet Explorer & Chrome.

Comment 1

[csmisson]

I love Firefox dearly.  It has been the only browser I use for years, now, but this problem occurs so frequently, and is so troublesome, I've gotten so I dread using Firefox.

Comment 2

[:aceman]

Can this be the same as bug 679800? Try the workarounds in comment 19 there if they help you.

Comment 3

[Miles Schumacher]

I have run into similar problems with Firefox 7 basically locking up the computer.  I tried removal of all history, cache, etc. to no avail.  The work arounds don't seem to work  When I try this page:
http://akweathercams.faa.gov/allcams.php
it will lock up.  I do not have the problem in Opera 11.51, and it is not as bad in Seamonkey 2.4.1.  It does seem to be a memory management issue as Norton file insite kicks out a message that over 500 mb of mem are being used by Firefox.  Hopefully a tweak in version 7.0.2?

Thanks.

Comment 4

[:aceman]

I do not have a problem on that page (FF7, Win XP). There are many images, so Firefox will use a lot of memory (known problem). But I do not get any lockup. The images are loading slowly due to my network, so they incrementally appear in their places. But I can scroll the page fine while it is loading.
Have you tried Firefox Safe mode? https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode . Also try a clean profile: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager .

Comment 5

[Miles Schumacher]

Thanks for the help.  I didn't have success in safemode, however, I have PCTOOLS performance toolkit on the machine and I did some cleaning up on the registry and it appears to be working better.  I agree, it does take a long time to load even on 12 mb connection as there are a couple hundred images.  I got it to where it will load, though the machine performance is pretty much nil during that time, and after they all load I can scroll through etc.  I watched the memory usage during the load and it was running low (about 20k) during the loading, then and the end ramped up to about 440k.  At that point I could scroll through them.  I'm running XP with 1gb of RAM, perhaps more RAM would make the difference.  At least it works after cleanup and also I dumped all history and cookies to make things clean.

Comment 6

[:aceman]

In comment 3 you said it will lock up. Now if it just gets really slow but ultimately loads the page and runs then it is not a bug. Yes, Firefox probably uses too much memory for images, you can follow this problem in bug 683284 (appropriately named "We suck at images") and its dependencies. So if Firefox allocates 500MB and you have only 1GB and the machine is swapping heavily then more RAM will help you.
You can try setting image.mem.decodeondraw to true in about:config which will at least release memory for images in tabs that are not currently active. But it will be a bit slower. This setting is getting to be the default in future versions of Firefox.

Comment 7

[Miles Schumacher]

Thanks for your comments.  I believe the problem with the slowness is with the swapping issue.  Other than this problem, FF7 has worked great and is much faster than a few versions back.  I think I'll either need to upgrade memory, or better yet to to a Windows 7 machine with 6 or 8 gb.  Thanks for the pointer to 683284 to watch too.

Comment 8

[:aceman]

OK, so add yourself to some of those bugs linked there.
But this one is about "massive CPU use", not memory use.
I need to find out what the original reporter sees.

Comment 9

[Miles Schumacher]

Thanks again.  You are right, it turned out to be memory use.  I upgraded to 2 gb and all works find.  Before it was hard to tell as the disk activity would become constant, you couldn't stop it or do anything like the computer froze in a do loop. So, not a true computer freeze after all.  Thanks for all your help.

Comment 10

[Giusseppe]

This has happened to me TWO time already. using 7.0.1 (I guess it's this one as well) on Windows Vista Home Premium. Not sure if it's because I have 3 tabs open (youtube,tumblr,chat of a forum). 
Started happening to me when I went to this site and I left clicked something. It created another tab and it just kept loading and then all of the tabs could not connect (keep loading). I had to kill it with the Task Manager.

Comment 11

[Giusseppe]

This NEEDS to be look into more by the dev team of Firefox. I think it may be with the plugin proccess or something. It already happeneded to me about 5 times today, in an hour >____> PLEASE fix this Firefox [otherwise I'll stop using Firefox]

Comment 12

[:aceman]

Giusseppe you can try going to about:config and set network.http.max-connections to 32.

Comment 13

[Giusseppe]

Ok, going to change it to 32 to see what happens.
This is how it was by DEFAULT: 256
I will comment if it happens yet again ^^

Comment 14

[:aceman]

Please also comment if it doesn't happen again in several days :)

Comment 15

[Giusseppe]

well, at first it almost happened before I restarted firefox when I did the change
So far it haven't happened. What does happen sometimes is that it will use up a lot of memory, but that could probably be because this laptop I have is only 2gb and I had many tabs openned at that presice moment.

And yes, I will comment again if it happens again.

Comment 16

[Giusseppe]

Updating this: first of all, I believe this problem is similar to this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=692260
And after that restart, I haven't had any problems with this bug. Firefox 8 just came out today which I think it has the fix.  
BTW, is it ok to put the "network.http.max-connections" back to "Default" or to just leave it (just saying since I don't get this problem)??
Thanks.

Comment 17

[:aceman]

Yes, that it what I was considering. In FF8, you can reset it to default (which is now 48).
But we need reply from the original reporter before closing this bug.

Comment 18

[Giusseppe]

cahnged it to default, the problem is back for me. going back to 32 since that works fine for me with no problems.

Comment 19

[:aceman]

Then please mention that in the bug 692260. Maybe the new default of 48 is still too high.

Comment 20

[Valerie Liu]

Attachment: same problem

Thanks from tiolecchaire1973.