fox fatigue: getting progessively slower until unusable

Also memory use isn't growing, so it doesn't look like a memory leak.

I have this problem too. I was about to file a new bug report when I found this. I can upload config files or have ubuntu-bug do it if someone is interested.

After Firefox has been running for some time, typing gets very slow. Both in text forms and in the address bar, it can take up to 1/2 second for each character to appear. This is accompanied by Firefox being generally slow and using 15% CPU in the background. Typing in other programs is normal.

I like to open a lot of tabs. I suspend and resume the laptop often. Flash, Acroread and a whole bunch of extensions are installed. It's an Intel Atom CPU and Intel Mobile 945GME graphics. Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Netbook Remix, upgraded from Jaunty. Not the same as #288953.

Since we both have the DownloadHelper extension I tried disabling it and rebooting, but Firefox still gets very slow after a while.

> Since we both have the DownloadHelper extension I tried disabling it and
> rebooting, but Firefox still gets very slow after a while.

Thanks for trying that. I suspected DownloaderHelper because downloading many Youtube clips seemed to accelerate the slowdown. Perhaps it could be flash-related?

It's an annoying bug to troubleshoot because there is no way of reproducing it quickly.

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I noticed the same problem in Mozilla Thunderbird. It seems to be independent of Firefox. After running Thunderbird for a long time typing gets slow and loads the CPU heavily. As with Firefox, restarting Thunderbird helps.

I found something interesting: this does not affect password fields.

> I found something interesting: this does not affect password fields.

That is interesting.

I wonder if it could be related to spell checking. I'm going to try turning off the spell checker and see if it changes anything and will report the outcome in a few days.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Using%20the%20spell%20checker#Disabling_automatic_spell_checking

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Can you confirm this when no addons are enabled?

I tried creating a whole new profile, with no extensions and without importing any settings or bookmarks. The same problem still appears although it seems to take longer. Firefox does not use much RAM, only ~100MB. Password fields are not affected, but all other fields and the address bar are.

One strange thing is that there are two languages to choose from for spell checking: "en_US" (default) and "English/United States".

@Tor did you also turn off Flash?

No, I just created a new profile, so Flash is still there. I will try removing it next.

I can confirm that this bug occurs with Firefox 3.6.3+nobinonly-0ubuntu4 with a fresh install of Lucid 10.04.
Add-ons: flashblock, adblock plus, downloadhelper.

@Gabe: I don't think this bug report is incomplete. The description is as complete as it can be. Saying "try without flash" is about as helpful as saying "switch off your computer for a week". If firefox provided a way to track cpu usage, this bug would be isolated and resolved much faster.

If there's an add-on for cpu usage tracking that would help progress this bug, I'll be happy to give it a try.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Could you please try to obtain a backtrace by following the instructions on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Bugs? Also, please answer these questions:
Is this crash reproducible? If so, which are the steps that lead to it?
Which flash package do you have installed?
Which Java package do you have installed?
Which Firefox extensions do you have installed?

This will greatly aid us in tracking down your problem.

We'd like to figure out what's causing this bug for you, but we haven't heard back from you in a while. Could you please provide the requested information? Thanks!

@drew: If you read the rest of the bug description you'll see this isn't about a crash. So a backtrace is not possible and an strace would run into the gigabytes.

The flash/java versions are not particularly relevant because this bug dates from at least release 9.04 so the versions have changes several times without affecting the bug. But for completeness:
openjdk-6-jre 6b18-1.8.1-0ubuntu1
flashplugin-installer 10.1.82.76ubuntu0.10.04.2

The extensions in use have already been listed above. For completeness here they are again: flashblock, adblock plus, downloadhelper.

"This will greatly aid us in tracking down your problem." Good luck with that. I don't think this bug will be understood until we have some way of seeing where the CPU cycles are going. A useful step forward would be to see if the cpu being hogged in one of the extensions or in firefox, and if it's in firefox what part. Suggestions to achieve that would be helpful.

You do not need to cause the program to crash to get a backtrace. If you attach the debugger to the problematic process and upload the logs it will shed some light on what is causing problems. Thanks in advance!

@drew: What's the best way to get this trace with gdb? Mozilla's advice only speaks of gdb with crashes http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_a_stacktrace_with_gdb

You can read: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Backtrace for more information. To start Firefox in gdb use "firefox -g" in the terminal instead of "gdb <program> 2>&1 | tee ~/gdb-<program>.txt" and continue from there. Pay particular attention to step 4 as it will tell you how to continue when it hangs instead of crashes.

@drew: running a trace for lengthy periods is simply not practical for me.

Here is an update:

Firefox has been running for 1 week and it has been getting progressively slower. I have closed all tabs so that I have only one window open. This window has only one tab and there is nothing rendered in that tab (it's blank).

*** Firefox is *continuously* using 28% of the CPU (Intel T6670@2.20GHz). ***

So what is firefox doing? If you don't know, it's time you guys added some instrumentation. What's the point of having new features if it runs like a dinosaur and we all migrate to Chrome?

Platform: firefox 3.6.12, but this has happened with all versions since at least 3.5.3. Extensions as above.

[Expired for firefox-3.5 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]