Why is Firefox 4 freezing when I wake my Mac up from sleep?
I just upgraded to FF 4. Every time I wake my Macbook Pro up from sleep mode (from having put it to sleep/closing the lid, with FF still running), FF freezes. This only began happening since I upgraded 2 days ago.
It doesn't crash. Every other program that was running before works just fine, the mouse works, keyboard, etc. But FF appears frozen, won't actually open new URLs (it just sits there after I've typed a new URL or tried to use one of the tabs I had open from before putting it to sleep), and each time I've had to force quit FF and re-open, and then it works fine.
This was not an issue with FF 3.
Any ideas? I looked around for similar questions in the forum but only saw posts about FF crashing, not freezing.
Modified by chill78
All Replies (15)
Also - why can't I find this question again when I search for the words "freezing Mac sleep"? I'm surprised anyone was able to find my question since it doesn't come up in the searches I've tried.
This is seriously getting annoying. I work on my Mac all day, get up, grab a bite to eat, get the mail. I come back and EACH TIME I have to force-quit FF and then re-open it, and half the time now it does it's "OOPS, this is embarrassing, we've lost your tabs" routine.
I've been a devoted FF user for years and years and the amount of troubles I see people posting on here makes me lose faith. Seems like Mozilla was just keen to crank something out at the right time rather than making it the right version.
Hi there,
I am experiencing the same bug in Firefox 4 on my Mac. In addition I have noted the following behavior from Firefox when it becomes "frozen" after i resume from sleep:
- The UI is unresponsive to any mouse input, but is still responsive to keyboard input, i.e. I am able to switch tabs with C-Tab.
- The process "firefox-bin" is consuming 100% of a single core (i.e. likely a rouge thread)
- Doing a sample of the aforementioned process, shows a large number of threads currently in a semwait call. Combined with 2) this seems to point to a livelock issue.
Modified by micdah
Same issue here too. Especially as Chill78 describes it above. And getting very frustrating. I have to constantly force quit Firefox when I am away from my computer for awhile - it is just totally frozen/dead when I return. Getting way old fast. Where is the tech help on this???
same problem here, but i saw it back on 3.6. recently switched to ff 5.0.1 to see if the latest and greatest fixed things, but it didn't.
basically, when waking back up, ff goes crazy and starts spawning THOUSANDS of threads for my on my macbook pro (running OSX 10.6.8). what process forks so many threads on wake?
when things are running fine, i only see that the number of threads == number of tabs. but yeah... after wake, the number of threads start spiking, cpu usage spikes, force quit.
mha007:
so this isn't some memory leak issue (which would likely get fix be restarting - the "solution" for the "prolonged use" bullet). this is definitely reproduceable for me by letting my laptop go to sleep and seeing the thread counts start to go crazy for firefox in activity monitor.
did you try the solutions suggested in the article i posted earlier ?? did it help to resolve your problem ???
yeah, i had tried everything on that article even before reading it. sigh.
Firefox is already running but is not responding
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox%20is%20already%20running%20but%20is%20not%20responding
Check and tell if its working.
Modified by Hasan
it's not a profile issue. or a concurrent firefox process issue.
Reducing Memory Usage - Firefox
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_-_Firefox
Check and tell if its working.
Note: i think this article just came out this week in last 2-3 days, haven't seen it before
Modified by Hasan
wow... really? i know you're trying to help, but if you read that article you cite, it looks to be super old. references to ff 2, win 98/me/xp, 150mb of memory usage is "high"... thanks though.
still contained some useful suggestions like trying to limit memory caches. however, the issue at hand SPECIFICALLY is about threads being forked off like mad. see micdah's post.
High Memory Usage
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/High%20memory%20usage
Firefox Consumes a lot of CPU Resources
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox%20consumes%20a%20lot%20of%20CPU%20resources
Check and tell if its working.
Modified by Hasan
Did you ever figure this out Razamatan? It was happening to me in FF4 and now with FF5 (5.01). I tried removing every trace of FF4 before installling FF5.
Please let us know.
Thanks!