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Firefox freezes every few seconds. I've tried refreshing/reinstalling firefox, running in safe mode, disabling hardware accelartion and unchecking accessability

  • 8 replies
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  • Last reply by Luis Pais

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Nothing works, firefox just hangs every few seconds, I even disabled session restore, set browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo and browser.sessionstore.max_window_undo to 0. It keeps freezing every few seconds.

I'm running firefox on linux.

Nothing works, firefox just hangs every few seconds, I even disabled session restore, set browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo and browser.sessionstore.max_window_undo to 0. It keeps freezing every few seconds. I'm running firefox on linux.

Chosen solution

My problem has been fixed!

My system is running on Arch and I just followed Arch's recommendation to fix this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/.../Unresponsiveness_in_Chromium_and_Firefox. However, I didn't need to disable vsync.

Thank you everyone !

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All Replies (8)

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Hi Luis, I don't know much about Linux.

Are you using the build from your distro's repository or directly from Mozilla's site?

Do you have a system-level performance monitoring widget that would show whether Firefox is maxing out CPU or disk, or is making heavy network usage?

Note: Disabling session restore would help reduce disk access, but since the file is only updated every 15 seconds at the most, that isn't frequent enough to account for this problem. Also, you can extend that time by modifying browser.sessionstore.interval with a new value in about:config (60000 milliseconds for 60 seconds, for example).

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By the way, if you can use built-in pages, check out the possible automatic connections in this article: How to stop Firefox from making automatic connections.

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You can create a new profile to test if your current profile is causing the problem.

See "Creating a profile":

If the new profile works then you can transfer files from a previously used profile to the new profile, but be cautious not to copy corrupted files to avoid carrying over problems.

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cor-el said

You can create a new profile to test if your current profile is causing the problem.

I forgot to add that to my question. I already tried that but Firefox keeps freezing in the new account.

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jscher2000 said

Hi Luis, I don't know much about Linux. Are you using the build from your distro's repository or directly from Mozilla's site?

Thank you for replying, I'm using my distros build.

jscher2000 said

Do you have a system-level performance monitoring widget that would show whether Firefox is maxing out CPU or disk, or is making heavy network usage?

I do, I'll report to you soon.

jscher2000 said'

'
Note: Disabling session restore would help reduce disk access, but since the file is only updated every 15 seconds at the most, that isn't frequent enough to account for this problem. Also, you can extend that time by modifying browser.sessionstore.interval with a new value in about:config (60000 milliseconds for 60 seconds, for example).

I'm also going to try that to see if the interval between freezes increases.

Thank you.

Modified by Luis Pais

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jscher2000 said

By the way, if you can use built-in pages, check out the possible automatic connections in this article: How to stop Firefox from making automatic connections.

By built in pages, do you mean Firefox's empty homepage ? If so, no, those kind of pages also freeze.

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I'm sorry it took me so long to reply, this week has been quite heavy on me. Anyways:

jscher2000 said

Do you have a system-level performance monitoring widget that would show whether Firefox is maxing out CPU or disk, or is making heavy network usage?

I just checked and firefox is not reporting any heavy network/CPU/disk usage.

jscher2000 said

Note: Disabling session restore would help reduce disk access, but since the file is only updated every 15 seconds at the most, that isn't frequent enough to account for this problem. Also, you can extend that time by modifying browser.sessionstore.interval with a new value in about:config (60000 milliseconds for 60 seconds, for example).

I changed the value to 60000 and there was no notable differences with the freezes.


But something unexpectedly weird happened, when I have my system monitor open, firefox doesn't freeze anymore. I think it has to do with my bios setting messing up my CPU. I'm going to explore this further.

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Chosen Solution

My problem has been fixed!

My system is running on Arch and I just followed Arch's recommendation to fix this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/.../Unresponsiveness_in_Chromium_and_Firefox. However, I didn't need to disable vsync.

Thank you everyone !

Modified by Luis Pais