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**Paul[_32_]** · December 4th 17, 10:59 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general

wrote:
On Mon, 4 Dec 2017 04:21:05 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

Anyhow, I need to downgrade to some version of FF between 18 and 47. I'm
not sure what version is the best, which will eliminate the extreme
drain on resources, and still run most current websites. Any
suggestions?

Hmm. I run version 26; this still has difficulty with _some_ sites
(though that _could_ be some of the settings and add-ons I have). With
thirty-odd tabs open, I find it still does the slowdown (though I'd say
after rather more than two hours), but I find closing and reopening it
usually speeds it up again - I don't clear the cache (if I ever knew how
to, I've forgotten). If I think things are a bit slow, I have a look in
Task Manager and sort by memory usage - if Firefox is hogging a lot,
then it's time to restart it.
This could give you a mid-point in your researches. (26 or 27 is the
last before one of the major changes in user interface - Atlantis,
Australis, something like that.) I'd not run XP-with-Firefox with less
than 1.5G RAM these days.
--

Some sites are just plain lousy. I think some of the people who create
webpages have no clue what they are doing. When I go on sites that cause
problems, I usually just pass and move on to another site. There are
plenty sites, why fuss with bad ones...

I'll check on ver 26 or 27. That sounds like a compromise.

To clear the cache, on the older versions go to TOOLS, and there's a
button "Clear Recent History". On the newer versions (such as 47), go to
HISTORY and look for the same....
You can select if you want to clear the Cache, clear cookies, and a
bunch of other stuff. The "cache" is the main thing to clear. Not only
does it slow stuff down on FF, but it uses a lot of drive space. When I
only had a 40gb drive and was low on drive space, clearing the cache
gained me over 1gb.

If I recall, ver 18 still had the cache clearing in the TOOLS.

You can put the Firefox cache in RAM. You can put
the whole Firefox profile (cache and Bookmarks) in
a RAMDisk.

But I'm not convinced that's the root cause of the
Firefox slowdown.

At some point, I noticed a lot more "garbage collection"
activity in Firefox. It's probably around the time that
they started using the video card as a compositor. And I have
a suspicion that activity "clogs up" the memory allocation
on WinXP. So it's not necessarily using too much RAM,
but it's absolutely shredded the RAM structure into
little bits and pieces. And when grabbing RAM, the
little bits and pieces have to be gathered together
to make big enough pieces.

Someone here was complaining about the Yahoo News page.
I opened Task Manager, loaded the page, and it almost
looked like Firefox was "breathing". The RAM usage was
going up and down like a yoyo, about once a second.
That can't be good. In that particular case (which
wasn't reproducible a few days later), it meant that
the CPU was busy sloshing stuff around, for no purpose.

But I still don't think that's your problem. Your problem
probably doesn't show excess CPU usage in Task Manager,
but the browser becomes slow when it wants to
"chow down" on the RAM. And the delay filling RAM
is what you're seeing. If closing the browser fixes
it, it's a Firefox problem. If rebooting the computer
(eventually) fixes it, it's a WinXP problem.

And the newest browsers have sufficient telemetry
capabilities, the developers can "see" stuff like
this happening, from their desk. They have almost
as good a system now, as Microsoft, only without
the "evil" part :-) The Mozilla telemetry isn't
there to datamine you. It's to detect performance
problems.

I was reading a thread yesterday (Bugzilla), where
Mozilla had detected a problem with a Kaspersky
DLL. There was a nasty interaction, causing
Firefox to crash. And they had all sorts of statistics
as to how many customers had crashes because of it.
And when Kaspersky pushed out an AV program change
to the Kaspersky customers, the Mozilla staff could
watch the crash rate drop to zero. They can see
how much memory the browser uses, and also get
a report when it crashes (that part of it, has
been there for a long time, the crash logging).

Paul