17

Does anyone know how to fix this high cpu usage by a firefox subprocess called RDD Process ... or as a temporary band-aid How can I disable "RDD Process" until it gets fixed on firefox ? as a loyal ff user since its "there be dragons" days I'd hate to stop using ff however new ff users will not put up with this ff bug

here is top showing this

$ top

top - 10:46:45 up  1:33,  1 user,  load average: 1.52, 1.12, 0.75
Tasks: 451 total,   1 running, 449 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
%Cpu(s):  7.1 us, 10.2 sy,  0.0 ni, 82.7 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :  63964.8 total,  48381.4 free,  10170.6 used,   5412.8 buff/cache
MiB Swap:  67584.0 total,  67584.0 free,      0.0 used.  52009.7 avail Mem


PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                      



9616 olaf      20   0  687632 124196  98824 S 167.6   0.2   8:06.11 RDD Process

  11115 olaf      20   0 3478912   1.0g 142712 S  45.9   1.6   2:05.58 Isolated Web Co

   9154 olaf      20   0 5345052 918880 434104 S  37.8   1.4   9:23.10 firefox-trunk

   3318 olaf      20   0 7468292 375644 173560 S   8.1   0.6   4:51.18 gnome-shell

   3828 root      20   0  394520  33684  27112 S   5.4   0.1   0:00.70 fwupd

  19979 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   5.4   0.0   0:09.26 kworker/u32:0-i915

  20667 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   5.4   0.0   0:06.43 kworker/u32:4-i915

     65 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   2.7   0.0   0:00.78 ksoftirqd/8

   3084 olaf       9 -11 2622692  31628  22540 S   2.7   0.0   0:25.00 pulseaudio

   9014 olaf      20   0  751244  92592  66272 S   2.7   0.1   0:06.94 gnome-terminal-

This just started other day ... previously I have never seen RDD

firefox   118.0a1 (2023-08-19) (64-bit)

uname -m && uname -r && cat /etc/*release
x86_64
6.2.0-26-generic
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=22.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=jammy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS"
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS"
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION_ID="22.04"
VERSION="22.04.3 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)"
VERSION_CODENAME=jammy

and yes it did not help by resetting my local settings by issuing

        rm -rf ~/.mozilla
        rm -rf ~/.cache/mozilla

this is on a beefy desktop and this RDD Process was consistently using high cpu forever ... it was not a temp short lived cpu spike ... however after repeatedly killing firefox and relaunching the RDD did reappear across several such cycles ... as I write RDD Process is gone yet this entire sequence of events has repeated itself across past week or so

coincidentally with above RDD issue, youtube now sometimes fails to play a video upon clicking the video yet same video plays OK on other browsers like Vivaldi

Below answer does not solve this high cpu issue ... How can I disable "RDD Process" until it gets fixed ? I do not want a cpu core pegged all day as I continuously use firefox even when only viewing very well behaved sites like SO ... after killing ff all is OK until I try to watch a youtube video at which point cpu goes to 100% and stays pegged forever AND the youtube video fails to render

UPDATE ff hamburger menu -> Troubleshoot Mode -> Restart ... just to disable all addons afterwards the RDD issue goes away however I would never use ff without my addons so this is not a solution

Major fault of this RDD bug is that cpu usage increases each time I click on a youtube video in a different tab even though none of these videos plays ... the video just sits there not rendering any video after clicking on it AND this high cpu usage continues even after I click on a different tab say the tab for this SO question ... see new tab under this condition :

top - 08:04:00 up 36 min,  1 user,  load average: 2.40, 2.68, 1.68
Tasks: 420 total,   1 running, 413 sleeping,   0 stopped,   6 zombie
%Cpu(s):  4.6 us,  9.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 85.8 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.1 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :  63964.8 total,  49344.6 free,   6397.0 used,   8223.1 buff/cache
MiB Swap:  67584.0 total,  67584.0 free,      0.0 used.  56082.6 avail Mem

PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                      



85851 olaf      20   0  670148 122840  96472 S 162.5   0.2   4:09.69 RDD Process

  26395 olaf      20   0 4256544 673516 298232 S  20.8   1.0   4:22.72 firefox-trunk

  26727 olaf      20   0 2909912 374900 134212 S  14.6   0.6   1:37.87 Isolated Web Co

  66057 olaf      20   0 3264688 688376 137424 S  13.2   1.1   1:41.47 Isolated Web Co

      9 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   4.9   0.0   0:18.76 kworker/u32:0-i915

    827 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   4.2   0.0   0:22.57 kworker/u32:11-i915

   3350 olaf      20   0 7202140 354256 163644 S   2.1   0.5   1:06.91 gnome-shell

     15 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   0.7   0.0   0:01.31 rcu_preempt

     41 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.7   0.0   0:01.79 ksoftirqd/4

     54 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   0.7   0.0   0:03.61 kworker/6:0-events
Scott Stensland
  • 17,385

2 Answers2

9

That is called Remote Data Decoder (RDD) … It ensures that media decoders for web content are run in their own isolated process … It’s part of FireFox's Sandboxing Architecture … Strict sandboxing is getting adopted by major web browsers including FireFox as a security standard to isolate web content involved processes from the rest of the system/user processes … Nowadays rich web content enabling processes have become much more demanding of system resources and much more needy for high privileges that they must be strictly sandboxed in order to unleash their full potential safely.

High load spikes for short periods as is reflected with your system's reported load average i.e. load average: 1.52, 1.12, 0.75 are normal even if those spikes show an unexpected high number in e.g. top due to the nature of web content media rendering.

Please see related as well with more in depth discussion:

Raffa
  • 34,963
5

SOLUTION

on firefix goto URL     about:config
and search for          media.rdd

then double click on    media.rdd-process.enabled
to give it a value of   false

for source see https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=262227

UPDATE lately ff version 126.0a1 (2024-04-05) (64-bit) no longer needs this setting and runs fine with default value true

on firefox show CPU usage per tab hold down Shift and it ESC

Scott Stensland
  • 17,385