M11x R1 Firefox CPU Usage?

Was wondering if anyone had been getting any weird problems with firefox 4 recently. I had just updated my flash and it seems like firefox 4 would at times go up to 70-80% of CPU usage. When loading a page, it would go straight to 100% which seems abnormal as normally, firefox 4 just at most takes up 50% (75% max) of my CPU usage even with others applications running alongside it or in the background.

Is it because of a new update on flash that is slowing down my machine? Im just wondering what it could be as I recently had just reformatted my computer loosely a month ago...I've flashed the BIOS to the newest version and have all the up to date drivers since the beginning of April 2011. I had also recently put a lot of things on my harddrive as 200GB is being used as of now with 250GB left. The normal CPU usage numbers were based on times where my harddrive werent filled up with stuff that I had recently downloaded and installed. Would there be any connections or am I just overreacting? Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Cheers,

Felix

 

Is it a 720p or 1080p flash video by any chance?

Try IE9 it has less power consumption and GPU acceleration.

Also, in task manager, how many processes are running? Typically around 45 is 0% CPU usage at idle.

 

It shows that there are 75 processes in task manager. I have tried IE9 as well, but it seems to hit the same problem when encountering flash.

And to answer your first question, they're mostly 720p videos as I watch some reviews on gametrailers sometimes. I just find this surprising as this never really happened before...

Edit: Just now, when I was using the performance monitor and the task manager to observe the CPU usage, on average firefox was using about 25-35% of the CPU in perfmon, where my total CPU usage was on average 50%+. Weirdly enough, something else popped up within these few days in the perfmon hogging up CPU which is titled "Deferred procedure calls and interrupt service routines". After it finished, firefox was using...wait for it...10% of CPU and on average 10-20% with the average total CPU usage in task manager being 20-35%.

Now I ran gametrailers.com just to see if it was the flash driver screwing around and it seems it may be, as firefox would then jump to 35% CPU usage in perfmon. I googled the issue and with the "Deferred procedure calls and interrupt service routines" this usually pops up when there are firmware or driver conflicts cited in this article:

http://languor.us/windows-7-high-cp...-procedure-calls-and-interrupt-service-routin

Now because this just happened to my r1 this week just after I updated flash to 10.3 something, I just want to see if anyone is experiencing these problems just after updating.

Moreover, would it be wise to uninstall flash and install it again? I'm a little worried that this would happen again but I dont want to touch anything since things are finally back to normal. Let me know and thx to those who replied!

 

This is in reference to a previous post that I had put up yesterday and this new thread is a simple update and inquiry to those who might have the same problem as me.

The previous thread is listed here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/579426-m11x-r1-firefox-cpu-usage.html

To summarize the problem I was having; about a few days ago, I had updated my flash player to the new 10.3.(dont know the specific numbers but you know the just) and my cpu usage begins to rise significantly compared to usage from before. Instead of the average 50%+ of usage on heavy use (being watching videos on gametrailers with on average, 2-3 tabs on the side opened) and the average 25-40% on normal use, I get around 70% average and at times, with only even gametrailers on, 80-100%.

I tried to isolate the problem in the perfomance monitor and it seemed that the problem arised from firefox and the plugin container that it uses. Now that I uninstalled the flash player's update, I'm only getting on average 15-30% CPU usage with 2 tabs opened. I find this to be very surprising and irritating because I can't seem to find the file for the old flash player for firefox whereas the archived versions only support IE...

I was simply wondering if anyone has been experiencing this problem with their R1 machine and if my diagnose of the problem is pinpointing the main problem or if I'm going at it the entirely wrong direction.

I've already diasbled all add-ons and extensions, so it seems to be that flash is the sole problem. My question is if anyone has experience with this and if they have a fix in mind and also if anyone knows where I can find an archived version of flash 10.2 for firefox.

Thanks for reading and Ill be looking forward to your replies!

Cheers,

Felix

 

Archived Flash Player versions

I just checked and it includes pretty much all operating systems as well as all supported flash browsers in the .zip file

However I dont understand the problem?

You are upset about Firefox having high CPU usage?

Considering you are an R1 user I must ask how much RAM you have and are you overclocking? Both which can significantly decrease your CPU usage.

 

Thanks for the reply!

And yes I am upset about Firefox using up CPU but it is because this just seems to be abnormal behaviour. I am just comparing it to how much CPU it used before the flash update as compared to afterwards.

I have recently just upgraded to 8GBs of RAM because I use photoshop, illustrator and indesign so I just hoped it'd help since they are cheap anyways.

As for the CPU, it has been overclocked the day I got it and there has been no problems with that whatsoever.

And lastly, the archived versions of flash just includes players for either linux or windows specifically and no files for firefox...

Please anyone, help me out!!

 

There should be two windows adobe installers, one for IE and one for other browsers in the .zip however I don't use Firefox so I couldnt test myself.


If anything you should switch from Firefox as I know for sure I get better usage with IE9 as I am loving the GPU-accelerated feature.

 

Hey MasivB,

Thanks for all your help and reply along the way.

However, I have actually tried using IE9 to diagnose the problem, and it really seems like it is the flash player that constantly causes the CPU usage to go straight up to 90-100%. I tested it through IE9 and firefox 4 with 2 tabs open, one being gametrailers.com and another being ign.com. Once I tried watching HD on both browsers, the CPU usage would then go straight up to 75% and then slowly to 80-100% of usage.

Just out of curiousity, would you be able to run those two websites with an HD video on gametrailers and let me know how much CPU is used on average in the perfmon and how much total CPU is used within a minute? It'd be a big help as it would offer me a benchmark of what the normal CPU usage should be.

 

*bump*

Would anyone else be willing to help me out? I understand it is quite the burden, but I hope this would also be of some help to others and most importantly, you'd be helping me a lot!

 

I dont know why you would "bump" it on the same day I was going to get back to you...

Anyway I have the R2 core i7 model so I don't get why this would help you but...

WITH 4 TABS running 1080p HD trailers off youtube. I get 25-50% CPU usage.

Core 2 Duo is garbage for HD content. I had a T5500 on my AW m5550 which was @ 1.66 GHz which is basically same speed as the M11x when overclocked and it would skip all the time unless I used GPU-acceleration (note this was in IE9)

 

haha sorry!! I'm just a little bit anxious as I'm working on a time limit before I take this machine overseas for months. I just reformatted this machine last month and I just don't want to do it again unless I really have to considering that I installed a bunch of the programs which took hours to organize and get together for my trip.

However, it seems that a reformat is the only way that I could really try and diagnose the problem and on the other hand, although yes the core2duo is the bane of the R1, I must disagree on its power while web browsing as like I indicated, weeks before my update the machine was able to handle several tabs open with HD Flash videos on the side. It has just been recently that it decided to act up like this which is causing me a lot of anxiety and worries.

Nonetheless, I really appreciate your responses and your help and I really mean it! Like I said, I'm just seeing if I can reach out to other people and especially those who own R1's so that if what I'm experiencing is in fact normal, it'll save me hours of time that I would be spending most likely soon, to reformat the computer and start from scratch.

So again, just seeing if there are any R1 users who could do a quick test like MasivB did and at least now, I know that maybe something's not right as from what I read, there's not that big of a performance gap between the R1 and R2 in terms of CPU usage (or maybe Im wrong on that too, do not quote me on that!)

 

2 youtube tabs open with 720p video going and cpu usage is under 15%..
core2duo is fine, i think something else is up. the SU7300 is actually pretty quick at higher clock speeds.

 

The CPU actually doesn't make a large difference for HD content.

I run 1080p smooth as can be on a single core sempron.

It's the GPU the majority of it.

 

Hey thanks for taking the time to do that, much appreciated!

Well you are right about that something is up, and most likely I would have to reformat and reinstall everything but on the bright side, everything will be fresh!

Again, I know I'm being very troubling, but do you mind tell me if you have recently updated your flash to the 10.3 update and if you use firefox as well?

Thanks again for all the replies guys!

 

no problem at all. i use google chrome with the latest flash player built in. chome ALWAYS gets the job done for me. i do have firefox 4 installed but i dont use it. but il test it and see what the results are.

 

Using Firefox 4.0.1 and Adobe Flash Player 10.3.181.14 I'm getting 20-40% CPU usage when opening 2x 720p videos on Youtube, mostly between mid-20s to low-30s.

plugin-container.exe takes between 10-20% CPU usage at any given time when the 2 videos are running. My system is a normal BIOS overclocked R1 running at 1.6 GHz

 

Thanks for all the support guys!

Again, I simply can't thank you all enough for the sincerity you've shown and the time you've taken to do this for me.

As of now, I guess that there is something really wrong as two youtube videos would still cause it to jump straight to 80%. I guess it's due for a reformat, and from there I just hope that it won't happen again.

Surprisingly, the plugin-container does sail around 10-20% for me, but it is firefox.exe which jumps to about the same amount and it is then that the system starts lagging which from day one, never happened on any internet surfing...

Anyways, I've always loved my R1 and I'm still hoping it'll hold out. Thanks for all the help again and it'd be great to see the benchmarks as they can offer me some to measure to when I reformat and hopefully help others if they encounter the same problem.

 

if i were you, id try using chrome. its an amazing browser. and everything is silky smooth with it. it might be just a firefox issue.

 

haha I dont necessarily disagree. I had been using Chrome and IE9 (recently after its release) but the reason I tend to have to stick with Firefox is simply because of some of its addons which are essential to my work. Sadly, I might just take your advice and only use firefox when I need the tool, but it wouldve been nice if I could save the trouble and just stick with one browser.

 

hmm, that is a good idea. but, you could always go back to a version of firefox 3 and see what happens with cpu usage.

 

Merged. Do not create multiple threads.

 

oops sorry! wont happen again

 

may i suggest trying chrome?

works great for me on my r1

 

FWIW, I would agree with those suggesting other browsers.

I had been a Fan of Mozilla/Firefox since early on, mostly for the add on aps, I get frustrated with it now though; just too much of a resource hog.

I had hopes for the latest incarnation but I'm still not entirely happy with it.

Chrome, for me, is faster but has a nasty habit of opening more processes as I start opening tabs; each one individually uses less resources than FF, but combined start hogging power as well.

I started using Chromium, which Chrome is built/based on, and it seems a bit snappier, but still has the tab/resource issue.

JMHO