why is firefox such a CPU hog?

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Mon, 16 Nov 2009, Scott Balneaves wrote:

> The problem here isn't LTSP.  LTSP can't "manufacture" cpu cycles out of thin
> air.  If a badly behaved application uses up all your cpu cycles, there's
> nothing LTSP can do about that: it's just a way of running remote X.

I work on a 2.8GHz P4 and I find Firefox to be a bit slow at times.  This
is partially my fault, I tend to have 50-100 tabs open at times.

One thing I've noted that improves both the performance and stability of
Firefox is Flashblock.  There are many functional uses of flash, such as
youtube.  However, a substantial number of flash objects which get loaded
are either invisible to the user (I can only guess they're used for
tracking) or are adverts which the users is probably not very interested
in.  If you install Flashblock, the users have to choose to load flash
where they want it and it will not be loaded otherwise.

I would suggest installing flashblock (it's packaged in Ubuntu) and see
if that helps.

Another interesting idea which was mentioned recently on a list I'm on was
placing a users firefox cache storage in shared memory instead of on the
disk.  This would not reduce user CPU usage, but it might free up the disk
in some instances which might make things feel a little snappier.  The
Firefox 3 Optimisation page says turn off caching which would also have
this effect, though you might be downloading a lot more data if you did
that without a decent caching proxy server.

Gavin