what on earth is firefox up to?

[JD]

On 06/30/2012 09:58 PM, Tim wrote:
> 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.
Not true in my case. I have set the cache size to 0.
>       2. A long page visit history.
The storage for this list is like a drop in the bucket compared
to the storage for a large web page cache.
>       3. Keeping the download list of everything you've downloaded.
The storage for that list pales in comparison to a large web page cache.
It is just appended to, so no insertions are made into the middle of
the list as it is not kept sorted.


>       4. Bookmarked RSS feeds that it's going to visit and fetch updates
>          from.
I have none of those!
>       5. Even just a large collection of static page bookmarks seem to
>          bog it down.
Why would that bog it down? Again, storage for bookmarks
is a drop inthe bucket compared with web page cache.

On my machine, with 0 cache storage, FF sometimes consumes
95% of cpu. Currently running 13.0.1

>
> 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.
>