I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon: starting Firefox takes two cores less than a second. When I shut Firefox down, though, it sends three cores to 50% for ten to fifteen seconds. Anyone have any idea what’s causing that?
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Firefox can be extremely frustrating when it comes to things like this. I’m starting to use Google Chrome when I can, it seems to be a better browser though not as mature.
I liked it when I tried it, but I’ve got a number of extensions that I’m quite fond of and I suspect I’d be annoyed trying to track down analogs.
I’ve asked Firefox to save my current windows + tabs on shutdown, and restore on startup. So I tend to accumulate FF windows + tabs. At last count I have something like 128 tabs distributed over 9 windows — but that was a few weeks ago. I’m not sure in what direction it’s varied since then.
It takes my FF significant realtime to shut down, but that’s not mysterious to me at all. I’m guessing that, quite aside from the time to actually serialize the key data, I’m seeing ~128 different threads queueing for some kind of lock to gain the right to talk to the appropriate file(s).
Your observation might suggest a spin lock that keeps the processors busy until granted.
That makes sense in your use case, but I don’t have my FF save that data; I start each new session with just the one default tab. Further compounding the issue is that when I close it, it vanishes instantly; it just takes significant realtime for the process to die. I only noticed the behavior because I’m absent-minded, and fairly often kill the browser only to remember a second later a link I wanted to visit. To do that, I have to manually kill the process or wait for it to time out.
I’d suspect it was extension-related behavior but I have only one extension that’s supposed to do work on shutdown and it didn’t cause comparable problems on my older machine.