Fix: Firefox 3 runs slowly keeps pausing and not responding on Ubuntu 9.10 Dual core

When I installed Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic" on my new HP Dual-core computer, I found that Firefox was having a lot of issues. It would startup alright, and load pages pretty fast. But mainly whenever I tried to open a new tab, or had a lot of tabs open, it would randomly stop responding for a few seconds at a time. Since I have compiz enabled, Firefox would "grey out" and stop responding to mouse clicks. CPU usage never exceeded 50% of both cores though.

I trued using the CPU Frequency Scaler applet on the panel to increase the CPU speed with no effect. Also, reducing the threshold at which the CPU frequency is raised had no effect either. It turns out that Firefox just doesn't like running across multiple CPUs for some reason. The solution was to restrict Firefox to run on a single core.

This can be accomplished using the linux utility "taskset". The command I used is shown below (run as root):

taskset -c -p 1 `pidof firefox`

An explanation:

• The -c says to use a zero-based number to identify cores (Core 1 is "0", Core 2 is "1", etc). The default is to use a bitmask (more advanced).
  
• The -p says to reuse the existing pid, and not start a new task.
• Then we specify the core (Core 2 in this case, we could separate them with commas such as "0,1" if we wanted both cores to be used). 
• Then we have another command, between backticks (` not ') that finds us the pid (Process ID) of the running Firefox.

This command has to be run every time Firefox starts. I'm looking for a way to change this automatically when Firefox is run - perhaps by changing the menu entry? Any suggestions are welcome!

Firefox 3 Downloads Reach World Record - 5 million downloads!

Well, they've done it! According to the Download Counter, Firefox 3 has now officially reached the "amazing" target of 5 million downloads in the 16 hours since release. Downloads so far are rolling in at a tremendous rate of 10 thousand per second. That's using up around 20Gbits/s of bandwidth - don't we all wish we could get that! :)

5 million downloads is a heck of a lot! Even Mozilla didn't appear to be expecting this, they said in the faq: "Let's shoot for 5 million--the sky is the limit!"

For those who don't know yet, Firefox has aimed for a world record on the first day of Firefox 3's release: The most unique downloads of any software product in 24 hours. You can Download Firefox 3 Here, or check out the World Record.

Firefox hits 4 million downloads

According to the official count, the total number of Firefox 3 downloads has now topped 4,000,000. The aim is to reach 5 million by tomorrow, and so far it looks as if that is going to happen quite soon. So if you haven't already downloaded Fx3, click here to join the World Record!

Please download Firefox 3 by 11:16 a.m. PDT (18:16 UTC) on June 18, 2008. That's 11:16 a.m. in Mountain View, 2:16 p.m. in Toronto, 3:16 p.m. in Rio de Janeiro, 8:16 p.m. in Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Rome and Warsaw, 10:16 p.m. in Moscow, and June 19, 2008 at 2:16 a.m. in Beijing and 3:16 a.m. in Tokyo.

Mozilla Firefox 3 RC 1 Released

Mozilla has just announced the immediate availability of Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1. This release is inteded for developers only, and will bring stability improvements from Beta 5. This release also marks the "feature freeze", which means that no new features will be added to Firefox before it's release later this year.
Get Firefox 3 RC 1