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This problem has been bothering for a little while now: Firefox slows my entire system (same thing with Chrome). Scrolling, opening new windows and typing text all lag. When firefox is open the rest of ubuntu lags sometimes as well. After watching this problem for a while, I believe that this may be due to firefox using only 1 core and maxing it out to 100% often. (Could this lead to these hickups/ lags?). (I've seen this behaviour especially with the firefox -new-window task).

I tried:

  • reinstalling nvidia drivers
  • tried updating my linux kernel
  • updated to the newest firefox version.
  • In Firefox I tried unticking using the recommended performance options, hand picking a number of cores.

My hardware setup:

  • Intel® Core™ i7-8565U CPU @ 1.80GHz × 8
  • GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with Max-Q Design/PCIe/SSE2 SSD harddisk
  • SSD harddisk

Software/driver/kernel setup:

  • Firefox 75
  • nvidia-driver-435 (proprietary)
  • Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS
  • Kernel: 5.3.0-51-generic
  • Gnome 3.28.2

I actually thought this was gone after downgrading the nvidia-driver to 435. But the problem either reappeared or was never really gone to begin with.

Maybe one more side-information (though I am not sure whether this is relevant at all): I installed steam and some games with some packages that were necessary for playing in the meantime. Not sure if this could compromise some drivers. I uninstalled steam and any game by now.

The most likely candidate to me is that some application throws a ton of errors and the handling of the errors/ retries fills up a CPU. Generally, the other 7 cores behave normally (low load as would be expected during browsing).

When looking at htop during such lags there is no one big culprit to this. the highest cpu load alway comes from firefox which is why I falsely accused firefox first. But actually firefox seems to behave normally. I have a hard time how to figure out what exactly contributes to the 100% on the one core. How can I figure this out?

Any help is much appreciated!

rob
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2 Answers2

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I had this issue on Ubuntu 14.04 a while back. I don't use Firefox on Ubuntu anymore without going into Firefox's advanced settings and removing almost everything I can find that stores data on your device.

My previous coworkers and I had found that even after closing tabs and windows, if it was still running, Firefox was saving large amounts of data to RAM and it would eventually crash the machine if we didn't regularly close all tabs and exit the browser. You can use HTOP more info on HTOP here to check how many threads (on possibly long-since closed windows and tabs) Firefox has going on your machine. If I recall correctly, this issue was specific to using Firefox with Ubuntu, and not other OSs at the time.

The advanced settings URL is about:config and it only works in the Firefox browser. Unfortunately, I do not remember which settings I changed or what finally worked. Be careful which settings you play with. At the time we edited things, information was not easily found to describe what every setting was for.

Kai
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What fixed it for me was:

sudo systemctl restart gdm3

I occasionally see one core being higher than the others still but it is not causing me any trouble anymore.

I now believe that this problem appeared after an update of ubuntu. Those are seriously dangerous.

rob
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