what on earth is firefox up to?

[Tim]

On Sat, 2012-06-30 at 22:17 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> Every time I start firefox after recent updates, top
> shows it periodically taking up to 50% of the CPU
> even if I'm just looking at a simple page of plain
> html (no scripts, not even any images) on my local
> web server.

General things that cause Firefox to chew through the CPU, when you
don't expect it to:

     1. A large cache, that it's going to process to work out what's old
        enough to be discarded.
     2. A long page visit history.
     3. Keeping the download list of everything you've downloaded.
     4. Bookmarked RSS feeds that it's going to visit and fetch updates
        from.
     5. Even just a large collection of static page bookmarks seem to
        bog it down.

Those are the ones that I can remember noticing over the years.  Point 4
has always seemed a terrible hog, seriously delaying the program from
even starting up, for me.  Point 1, tied with point 2, gets seriously
worse over time.

Go through your Firefox preferences, and check out what options are set.
Some of the defaults aren't always the best choices.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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