

Firefox is slow - troubleshooting - kilroy123
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox%20is%20slow

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riledhel
"Firefox may hang if left open for long periods of time. To fix the issue,
restart Firefox." Oh my God...

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thaumaturgy
I can't find that text on the page at the moment, but it's the truth.

Firefox (3.6) seems to have a really nasty problem in its garbage collection
system. If I leave it open for more than a couple of days, under normal use,
it starts hanging for a couple of seconds every minute to half-minute -- and
it hangs for longer, more often, the longer I leave it open.

Closing and restarting Firefox seems to clear the issue up. At least, for a
while.

The only reason I still use Firefox is because of AdBlock Plus. The moment
someone comes up with a replacement that's as good, I'm done with it and never
looking back.

edit: oh, and by the way: this bug, combined with Google "Instant"? _Very not
the best thing ever._

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barrkel
I regularly ran Firefox 3.6 (I'm on v4 now) for weeks at a time, and never had
such issues. I'd guess it's an extension or plugin you had installed.

My biggest problem with Firefox (v4 only) is shutting it down takes ages as it
iterates through every file in the cache, which is encrypted on my machine. I
limited my cache size to 50MB, which seems to have limited the pause times to
something reasonable.

I cannot stand Chrome though; I hate the way it selects text on the page with
the mouse (I'm a compulsive selection-reader), and the cobbled-together
extension replacements for the Bookmarks menu don't work nearly as well as a
proper menu.

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thaumaturgy
I do have a few extensions installed & enabled -- AdBlock Plus, Firebug,
Greasemonkey (rarely used, I should just uninstall it), Flashblock, and YSlow.

But, I've seen similar behavior on at least one other system, and the only
extension we had in common there was AdBlock Plus. The behavior also predates
Greasemonkey.

The other system is newer, and the slowdown there is less pronounced (though
still noticeable), which leads me to suspect that there's some task that runs
regularly that performs well enough on fast enough systems to be less
problematic, but becomes a miserable dog on older systems -- a pretty typical
case of programmer "fast enough for me".

Apropos of nothing: I don't get you compulsive selection readers. I'm always a
little bemused when one of you speaks up. Why do you do that? It's so weird.
:-)

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AlisdairO
I have no idea, all I know is that when I can't do it it feels like something
is deeply wrong :-)

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nhebb
Tip: If Firefox is slow / consuming too much memory, start a private browsing
session then close the browser. When you restart it, all the tabs will re-open
to the previous pages, and the memory footprint is usually smaller.

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ww520
I just wish Firefox doesn't crash as much. I got a crash at least once a day.
Already using 4.0.1.

