[RESOLVED] NS 1.9.5 and 1.9.5.73 lead to high load

[bbarth]

My FF 3.0.11 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060309 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.11) runs at about 50% CPU load with NS 1.9.5 and 1.9.5.73. A downgrade to 1.9.3 seems to be fine. A look around the forums doesn't show any reports on this. Any thoughts? Is there anything else I need to post for y'all to have a chance to debug this?

Bill.

[therube]

Since 1.9.3 works OK, my first thought would be to disable ABE & see what happens.
(ABE started with 1.9.3.4.)

Otherwise, General troubleshooting: missing icons/menus, etc.

[Tom T.]

Obviously, our systems are different in almost every way, but FWIW, before I started typing this, CPU fluctuated between 0 and 8%, with one "spike" to 18% for a split-second. (Background processes, no doubt, since I wasn't doing anything or changing anything.) Two browser windows open; AV and firewall running. ABE enabled with default rules.

therube gave a good place to start. Other questions that come to mind:
Always, or only at certain sites, or only during certain activities (posting messages, watching videos, etc.)?
What other extensions are installed? The General Troubleshooting will take you there anyway, but sometimes certain extensions conflict with NS.

Grasping at straws: Did this start before Tuesday US time, since that was MS Patch Tuesday? I saw the Ubuntu in your useragent, but a lot of users also have a MS OS on their machine. Might have been constantly checking for updates or downloading/installing them, or trying to. If you do in fact have a dual-boot system, has MS been booted so that updates would be attempted, and does the symptom occur with either system booted? Long shot... but might as well ask.

RAM usage normal, or also excessive?

Do you have anti-virus? Scanned the machine to see if perhaps a worm or Trojan is eating the CPU? That would be the possibility that scares me the most.

Let us know what you find out.

[bbarth]

~50% CPU usage was essentially constant with some fluctuation between 30 and 60%. Memory usage seemed normal, but I'll look again. This condition happened with "about:" being the only open tab. There's no Windows OS involved. Lots of other extensions were installed, but I disabled them all and toggled NS in and out before coming here. The load wasn't just any load, but FF load (confirmed via top). I'll check on ABE later today and report back.

Bill.

[bbarth]

OK, I can't reproduce this today. There was an Ubuntu update this morning that, among other things, installed a new kernel. Perhaps it was a strange interaction between my specific Linux distribution and FF and NS. I'll keep my eye on things and start a new thread if it happens again. Thanks to everyone that had suggestions.

Bill.

[Tom T.]

Thanks for letting us know. I'll mark this "Resolved", and as you say, if it recurs, start a new thread.
Cheers.