[olug] Firefox = high cpu load

[Adam Haeder]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I'm running Firefox 2.0.0.1 on SuSE 10.0. After doing the normal web
browsing thing for a few hours, almost every day I notice that my
workstation load is > 1. 'top' says that firefox-bin is consuming 99.9% of
the cpu. The app is responsive and everthing seems to work fine. If I
close firefox and restart it, the load goes back down for a few more hours
until it jumps back to 99.9% again. This seems to be unrelated to any
plugins like flash or java or anything.

Here is an output of strace from this morning:

gettimeofday({1168538564, 858176}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 858232}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 858288}, NULL) = 0
futex(0x8a74f98, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
futex(0x8a74f94, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
gettimeofday({1168538564, 858796}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 858853}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 858934}, NULL) = 0
futex(0x8a74f98, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
futex(0x8a74f94, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
gettimeofday({1168538564, 859497}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 859562}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 859614}, NULL) = 0
futex(0x8a74f98, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
futex(0x8a74f94, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
gettimeofday({1168538564, 860104}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 860230}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 860282}, NULL) = 0
futex(0x8a74f98, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
futex(0x8a74f94, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
gettimeofday({1168538564, 860763}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 860819}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 860870}, NULL) = 0
futex(0x8a74f98, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
futex(0x8a74f94, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
gettimeofday({1168538564, 861328}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 861385}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 861466}, NULL) = 0
futex(0x8a74f98, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
futex(0x8a74f94, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
gettimeofday({1168538564, 861919}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 861981}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 862036}, NULL) = 0
futex(0x8a74f98, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
futex(0x8a74f94, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
gettimeofday({1168538564, 862519}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 862579}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 862631}, NULL) = 0
futex(0x8a74f98, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
futex(0x8a74f94, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
gettimeofday({1168538564, 863067}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 863126}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 863178}, NULL) = 0
futex(0x8a74f98, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
futex(0x8a74f94, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
gettimeofday({1168538564, 863622}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 863681}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 863734}, NULL) = 0
futex(0x8a74f98, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
futex(0x8a74f94, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
gettimeofday({1168538564, 865206}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 865300}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168538564, 865354}, NULL) = 0
futex(0x8a74f98, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1
futex(0x8a74f94, FUTEX_WAKE, 1)         = 1


It goes on and on like this forever. Is anyone else seeing this behavior?
Why is firefox calling gettimeofday this many times a second?

- --
Adam Haeder
Vice President of Information Technology
AIM Institute
adamh at aiminstitute.org
(402) 345-5025 x115
PGP Public key: http://www.haederfamily.org/pgp.html
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFFpnwabHC3IXlHqBQRAg7GAJ90rAOoRh9bbcgEGE5zyDET8+PgZwCgm/22
W1J80uRi5v34r8ufKi34wWE=
=kchW
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----