Firefox, Opera and Transmission each use 90% of CPU in a few situations

[Eugen]

Hello,

I enjoy using VL 5.9 light for about 2 weeks now, on a P3 256MB RAM. I installed Firefox 2.0.0.11 and Transmission 1.21 using Gslapt.
The only problems are (i don't think it's related to Vector, maybe to flash plugin, or some network services?):

- Firefox 2.0.0.11 plays Flash videos like youtube, with lots of pauses, even if the data is retrieved and cached, it keeps CPU at about 95% all the time a flash object is present - and sometimes crashes with Flash, or it takes 1 minute to respond;

- Opera plays good Flash, but keeps CPU at 90% - rarely crashes with Flash;

- Transmission 1.21 works great, with CPU at 2-10%, depending on traffic/encryption, but this only when I use other programs and there are activities; if i leave the computer with only Transmission started for about 30min-1h, when I come back and I use top, I see that Transmission uses 90% CPU. The program is not crashed, downloads normal, but i have to close it and reopen to get back to 2-10% CPU.

I should add this CPU consumption is real, and it gets quite warm, the cooler going in high speed mode. Except these situations, the CPU consumption is very low, and it is cold. The results are for JWM window manager.

Any help is apreciated, VL is very nice and i would like to solve this problem. By the way, I would like Transmission to be included in future VL light distributions, because it's used a lot.

Thanks for your help

[Masta]

Have some system spec's for us ?

[caitlyn]

The Firefox issue is a Firefox/Flash problem, not a VL problem.  I've seen the same or worse (100% CPU) on my machine (1.2GHz Intel Celeron CPU, 512MB of RAM) under Vector Linux, Ubuntu, Slackware, Wolvix, and Zenwalk recently.  Firefox 3.0.1 is even worse, maxing out the CPU lots of the time, not just with Flash and Java.  What kind of processor are you using?

Opera is better most of the time.  I've maxed the CPU with it as well but not nearly as frequently as with Firefox or Seamonkey.  Again, I don't see a great deal of difference based on distro here.

[Masta]

I'm not seeing them max out CPU on my system. I do see them spike when starting it for the first time, but not near as high when closing and starting them again. I guess this might be because HD is adding to it, and memory allocation/mapping which are being controlled by the CPU as well.

However, I have heard of this issue many times about Firefox, but often I see it on lower end CPUs (Celeron  and similar) with very small cache. This is why I questioned the system specs. He did say he has a P3, but I was looking for more detail, perhaps using

Code:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

could help shed some light on the specs?

My specs:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+
2 GB RAM