Hi all, just after a few opinions on a bit of an issue with my dad's PC. I built him a new system a few months back and basically he's having a few issues with Firefox performing sluggishly. I say sluggish, but he plays a fair few Facebook games which rely fairly heavily on Flash I'm assuming. He mainly plaus Kingdoms of Camelot (yes, it must be like Battlefield for the over 50s!) which as far as I know is a flash based game. Anyway, the majority of the time he will have 5-6 tabs open, all with this KOC game running in each tab. Apparently he needs that many tabs since he has multiple cities or whatever it is in the game! With all of these tabs open, Firefox feels pretty sluggish whenever you try to do anything else. Browsing in a separate tab is sluggish and even when you go through the menus it feels a tad slow. I've had a look at his CPU and memory usage and both are at about 50% load during this. The Firefox process in Task Manager is using just over 1GB RAM to itself. At first, I suspected some of his add-ons so disabled them all, however this made no difference. He only really uses Greasemonkey (for his game) and AdBlock Plus anyway. I've also uninstalled and reinstalled Flash and Java etc. and ensured all are at their latest versions. However, the problem remains. To be honest, it doesn't surprise me when he's running games in that many tabs etc. but I just wanted to know if maybe I have overlooked something. His system comprises of an Athlon II X2 250 3GHz, 4GB DDR3 and onboard graphics. It may well be an error on my part when I pieced together the system since I didn't think he would be using that many tabs etc. With DDR3 so cheap nowadays I was tempted to grab him another 4GB to drop in there but I want to be certain that's the problem before doing so. I know at the moment the whole system is using a little over 2GB out of the 3.5GB available (IGP takes 512MB for itself). I've heard of some people who have a similar memory footprint really seeing a boost in performance from 8GB of memory. However, as I said I want to double check before purchasing. Other than that, the CPU isn't up to scratch or the system would benefit from having a dedicated GPU. I know the CPU isn't the best in the world but we were working on a fairly tight budget when we pieced together the system and had to use what was available at the time. Surely it should be able to handle this though? What about the GPU? I know this obviously isn't a graphically demanding game but would a dedicated card free up some CPU and memory usage. I know it obviously would, but would it be significant? Basically, if I had to make an upgrade, where should I make it? All feedback is very much appreciated!
Good as it is Firefox is an awful resource hog, several tabs open will start to make serious demand on RAM, factor in flash, forget about it. Open task manager and check the firefox process in the 'processes' tab, it will give you an idea of how much RAM is being used. Also check to see CPU load too, if you are maxing the CPU your bottleneck may be there. Google Chrome is better, however with flash in use the gains may be negligible, worth a try before shelling out on RAM tho.
I've checked both CPU and memory usage and both are at about 50% usage for the whole system. Firefox is using just over 1GB to itself. When you factor in that the IGP takes 512MB for itself it leaves 3.5GB for the rest of the system. From what I've heard of Windows 7 it does a pretty decent job of managing the memory, but is it being choked a little by Firefox and Flash? Obviously being a 32bit program Firefox can't use for than about 3.5GB of RAM but I'm wondering if I drop more in will this give more headroom for Windows? I have thought about him changing browsers but as I mentioned he uses Greasemonkey for his game and refuses to part with Firefox, I guess he's used to it now. So is more memory the answer? Cheers for your feedback!
Doesn't firefox use plugincontainer for all plugin processes like flash? One thing I noticed recently is since updating to a newer version of flash, some laptops with on board graphics had issues plaing even low res utube movies if hardware acceleration was enabled for flash. I don't play many flash based games so i'm not sure how this translates into gaming but it might be worth switching it off to see, usually the preferences are in the right click menu of the flash window. There is no point buying any more ram. the fact that you only see 3.5GB of ram at the moment indicates it is a 32bit OS which can't address more than 4GB so unless you install a 64Bit OS, adding another 4GB will make no difference whatsoever. Also you said yourself, there is already plenty of memory to spare. When you say CPU usage is 50%, if it exactly that for most of the time (or hovering around it) then firefox/flash is using 1 Core's worth of power. You could try opening half the screens in another browser like chrome so the processing can be split over both the cores, making more efficient use of the CPU's power. So you'd effectively have 3 cities/games in firefox on 1 cpu core and the other 3 on another process open with chrome on the 2nd core.
^This Might be worthwhile throwing a cheap full fat GPU into the mix to see how it copes then? I must admit I know nothing of the efficacy of hardware accelerated flash though -- maybe someone around here has something based around Ion or similar and can enlighten you.
Will try playing with the hardware acceleration settings next time I'm at the old man's and see if that does anything. It's definitely Win7 64bit though, as I mentioned it can 'see' the full 4GB of RAM but only 3.5GB is available since the onboard graphics in his 880G motherboard uses 512MB. Both cores are at about 50% usage most of the time. Since Firefox isn't really multithreaded I'm assuming Firefox is utilising one core and Windows etc. the other or thereabouts. I can try running some tabs in Chrome etc as a test but as I mentioned, he's used to Firefox etc. and relies on add-ons for his game. I guess at least Chrome opens a separate process for each tab which helps with multi-core processors but at this point in time, Firefox is a must.
Yeah just realised on the integrated video memory, I'd still say if there is 50% free memory then adding more won't help much. The same doesn't go for CPU usage though, If you limited firefox to just one core you'd probably see it go to 100% usage for that core and the 2nd core drop to near 0. Windows freely distributes threads between available cores even if they are contained in the same process. Isn't there an option to open firefox windows as seperate processes?
