Comments on: Fix Excessive Firefox 3 CPU and Hard Disk Usage

By: James

James — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:37:07 +0000

I was using FF to defeat viruses but it is worse than a virus itself— FF sucks.

By: adrian rbo

adrian rbo — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:19:04 +0000

just use CCleaner from filehippo.com

By: adrian rbo

adrian rbo — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:18:11 +0000

i had the same problem but i found out that when i used CCleaner from Filehippo.com it all worked again!

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:47:42 +0000

No one, there are a few possible solutions here:

1. Do you have added feeds to Firefox?
2. Do you use the phishing protection in Firefox?

Both are known to cause that activity.

By: no_one

no_one — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:43:29 +0000

Same problem here with FF 3.5.4 on a clean Windows XP 32bit. A little while after having started FF, the HDD starts to work intensively for about 30sec. I did a search for this on Google and ended up here, seeing that I’m not alone. I’d really like to know what FF does!

By: James

James — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:51:21 +0000

OK, I just commented but here… I found what is probably the answer and solution. FF3 is downloading a phishing database which prevents infected page loads before loading the content:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20677170-FireFox-Firefox-3-is-doing-something-odd-to-my-PC

You can turn it off if you want.

By: James

James — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:45:43 +0000

Christ, I wondered what the heck was wrong with my computer but it’s obviously nothing— I am just about to unload Firefox because mine does the same thing… It will just randomly start using the HD like crazy and you can’t do anything. Annoying as HELL. I would hate to think about going back to the securityless I.E. though.

By: stian

stian — Sun, 24 May 2009 11:42:14 +0000

Hundreds or maybe tenth of Atom or RSS feeds may completly hog your machine while updating. Disable RSS FEEDS on FF3. Use Google Reader instead.

By: Uwe

Uwe — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:30:14 +0000

I’m on XP SP3 with FF 3.0.10. Sometimes FF puts the complete system as frozen for 30-60 seconds. I found out that some website with frames with embedded flashes cause a problem with the pop-up blocker of my firewall, in this case its kerio/SPF. The pop-up blocker modifies the sourcecode of the frame with the flash and the modified coding leads to paging and a frozen system for 30-60 seconds. I’ve diabled the pop-up blocker of my firewall and all is running well.

Check source code of frames with flashes for comments like ” .. modified by xxx pop-up blocker …” if you have similar problems and change firewall config.

By: Mergen from WEBGURU-CO.COM

Mergen from WEBGURU-CO.COM — Wed, 06 May 2009 02:54:11 +0000

Have you tried this link? It has all the information you need to speed up or optimize your Mozilla Firefox browser. It focuses specifically on this problem of how to reduce CPU usage of Firefox. I found it really useful. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_CPU_usage

By: Stian

Stian — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:38:26 +0000

Live RSS bookmarks in your Bookmark Toolbar (folder) is probably the reason. I deleted it and the wild hard disk activity started right at once and freezed FF3 for 3 minutes before the folder was deleted. This might be the bug.

AVOID RSS FEEDS IN YOUR BOOKMARK TOOLBAR FOLDER.

By: Scott Pierce

Scott Pierce — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:58:41 +0000

Thanks for the info!

I thought I was the only one but obviously not!
Mine was a little more extreme – memory usage in excess of 1.6Gb and a bit more for the page file – my page file went from approx 600Mb to 2.24Gb because of FF3. :(

You have saved my bacon! will link you from my blog as most other ppl would have the same issue \o/

By: Firefox 3 CPU Usage « devioblog

Firefox 3 CPU Usage « devioblog — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:01:38 +0000

[...] found that two tips helped me reduce both CPU and memory [...]

By: Firefox 3, excessive HDD usage at Justyn’s Blog

Firefox 3, excessive HDD usage at Justyn’s Blog — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:59:41 +0000

[...] I’ve noticed for the past couple days, there seems to be a constant read/write with my HDD when I open up Firefox. After trying to find out what it was, I decided to do a Google search for it, which brought me to a post on gHacks. [...]

By: vergo

vergo — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:17:08 +0000

Firefox 3 RC1 High CPU and Memory Use? Try this fix at the link below. It work for me

http://just-thinkin.net/2008/05/firefox-3-rc1-high-cpu-and-memory-use-try-this-fix/

By: Darwin

Darwin — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:22:44 +0000

Backing off to Firefox 2… this is a disaster… it occurs on multiple machines.

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:26:44 +0000

Thank you for the fast response!

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:25:49 +0000

Dan here you go

http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/09/how-to-export-live-bookmarks-in-firefox/

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:23:32 +0000

How did you export and delete your Firefox Live bookmarks? I’d like to do this, but have no idea.

By: greg

greg — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:46:08 +0000

A *lot* of live/rss bookmarks seemed to cause this problem for me.

FF3 would pretty much freeze and cpu/memory usage would spike every hour or so — especially when first started.

I strongly suspected it was related to Foxmarks synching bookmarks so first I disabled *all* of my extensions but it didn’t do anything. I usually keep 10+ tabs open at a time and carry them over into new sessions, so I cut down the number and that didn’t help either.

Deleting 95% of my live bookmarks wasn’t a major loss since I use google reader now and it fixed the problem.