So I regularly see issues in Firefox where pages from certain websites (Hello amazon.ca!) shoot to 100% CPU utilization and just never stop.
I’m wondering, is there a plugin that could periodically check the FF process list and identify tabs that are misbehaving like this (or in other ways, extreme memory consumption, perhaps?) and perform configurable actions like “Reload page (GET only of course) on tab” or “Kill tab” ?
It would be helpful because I see this issue on a daily basis, regularly to the point where these tabs are causing problems.
I already have “Auto tab discard” that discards unused tabs, but I’d like this as an extra feature, or a separate plugin.
Anyone who knows what could be useful?
@phoenixz
about:processesYeah, I know that one, but I don’t want to spend my days helping Firefox what it should do itself :)
Can you close tabs from there or just put them to sleep?
@l3ored you can close them with it. i find it useful for this purpose, though luckily i only rarely have the need. when you hover over any item listed in the table, at the rhs end a cross appears – click it to end that process, = close the relevant tab. you can sort the table columns by alphabet, memory, or cpu.
from my experience things like this generally don’t work to well. The problem is that once its at 100% the sytem is bogged down so it won’t actually kill it till the tab has calmed down and you can interact yourself again. Granted it might still get it before it spikes again so im not saying its without merit. Just warning to temper expectaions if you do find something like that.
partner uses Vivaldi which has a very practical option to disable background synchronization for all sites and make exceptions for some.
i can’t see something similar in firefox/librewolf preferences
Good idea. For me it’s Google Drive and gmail.
This is an interesting idea but Firefox itself should both limit resource consumption and do those sorts of stops. Hmm.
You’d think it would, and it somewhat checks when a page becomes unresponsive, but that’s it
Amazon pages (yeah, Amazon sucks, I know) typically just start normal and jump into 100% CPU after being open and left alone for an hour, and Firefox is all okay with that.
I’m not
this. no tab should be able to use more than like 10% cpu without a popup and the user manually enabling a higher level from a dropdown or something.
I’d change that to “more than 10% continuously” because any page can shoot to 100% in short bursts for a wide variety of valid reasons.
It’s the continuous load that is a problem, so basically 100% for 10 seconds straight would be a problem
see thats the problem. once it has 100% if it don’t let it go then anything setup to stop it can’t function. You have to have reserve. I mean you could do 90% maybe even 99% but honestly the issue there is it shoots up so fast the stop does not get a chance to launch.
This feels like a Band-Aid instead of fixing the root problem. I’ve never seen this happen, maybe you have a bad plugin causing it? Turn off all your plugins or start a new profile, then turn things on one at a time.
What is the root cause in your opinion, then?
To me, the root cause are sloppy web pages with JavaScript, and those ain’t gonna fix themselves, so yeah, it’s up to Firefox (if a plugin would exist for that) to do this
