Alright, good to hear 43.0 helped some. The quick notes at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/43.0/releasenotes/ don't show anything drastic, so it might just be the installer or 43.0 settings having fixed or improved something.

Here's hoping it stays stable now, but if not... the search will continue.

Phoxuponyou said

Alright, good to hear 43.0 helped some. The quick notes at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/43.0/releasenotes/ don't show anything drastic, so it might just be the installer or 43.0 settings having fixed or improved something. Here's hoping it stays stable now, but if not... the search will continue.

Ugh. The issue remains. But not instantly every time like with FF42. It's returned to occasional crashes and intermittent hangs.

I guess we're back to square one then. Stuffed after the holidays as I am, I can only think of swapping any antivirus/firewall solution(s) for something else to see if that was the issue. Even when Allowed, even having worked before, AV can change its mind at a moment's notice and cause the weirdest issues.

AV is probably in the Top 5 or even Top 3 of root causes for FF issues. Top 1 is Flash and Top 2 is Other Add-ons... :P

Thank you very much for your reply, Phoxuponyou. Happy New Years!

I still think it's Java...but perhaps I'll explore the possibility it's my Norton AV. But while I can live with it I may have to, I'm just too busy to do otherwise.

This issue happens for me on two different PCs with different OS' and different Comodo firewall versions. On the other PC it's rare enuf I can't really test it though (on that other PC I have almost no addons installed).

I thought of something that could be a lead. On both PCs, I'm most likely to elicit the issue is I load a webpage with numerous animated GIFs. Does this point towards flash instead of Java?

On the other, less frequently (unless I load a webpage with numerous animated GIFs) problematic PC I'm running Win7Pro32-bit so the Java is always current. (On both PCs the flash is always current.)

You can check the log in the Web Console for error messages and the Network Monitor (Firefox/Tools > Web Developer) to see if there are issues with loading content and how long it takes for content to arrive

• https://developer.mozilla.org/Tools/Web_Console
• https://developer.mozilla.org/Tools/Network_Monitor

Use Ctrl+F5 or Ctrl+Shift+R to reload the page and bypass the cache to generate a fresh log.

cor-el said

You can check the log in the Web Console for error messages and the Network Monitor (Firefox/Tools > Web Developer) to see if there are issues with loading content and how long it takes for content to arrive

• https://developer.mozilla.org/Tools/Web_Console
• https://developer.mozilla.org/Tools/Network_Monitor

Use Ctrl+F5 or Ctrl+Shift+R to reload the page and bypass the cache to generate a fresh log.

Thank you very much for your reply, cor-el!

I don't see anything on those right now, I guess the thing is that next time there's a crash I should take a look.

Happy New Year! coyote

A belated happy new year on my part as well.

GIFs shouldn't have much if anything to do with Flash, Flash only becomes involved if there are Flash components on the page like interactive slideshows or menus or videos. Some pages are so Flash-laden that they lay low browsers with less powerful hardware underneath. Animation is of course harder to load than a static image.

The different antivirus/firewall versions may have something to do with the frequency, but so might the hardware underneath. The OOM flag was raised before, so how much RAM are we talking about here and what is the CPU/GPU setup in your PCs? XP and 32-bit Seven are odd OS choices (noted that the first is not by choice).

Could you also give an example of and a link to a problematic page or site? I would like to check what sorts of elements are loaded there.

I do recall seeing that FF was using far more RAM than usual –a about 1.5GB—at the problem times, so I wondered if it might be a leak situation.

I also recall nevertheless having substantial free RAM (both PCs have 4GB) anyway.

I'm using Win7 on that machine since it's the most recent Windows version that CPU is allowed to run. Both machines are from 2004 (I'm money-impaired). They are:

WinXP Pro 32-bit: CPU: 2.4 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4800+ GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 7750 1GB 128-bit PCIe 3 x16 (Incidentally 8.1 is the most-recent version this CPU is allowed to run.)

Win7Pro: CPU: 3.2 GHz Intel Pentium 4 Northwood GPU: HIS Radeon HD 4670 IceQ 1GB DDR3 AGP

I can't remember a problematic page, and googling animated GIFs didn't help. I'll post if I can manage to run across one.

I happened to notice that my Java theory might be weakened now since sometimes when I run Vuze it doesn't keep FF from loading pages. But sometimes it still does. Anyway that seems somewhat improved despite no changes except more versions of FF (for all I know this could be another instance of a FF update dealing to some degree with an issue only I seem to have).

4 GB is very little. It's just about enough if all you do is browse the web, but one additional memory-intensive program and you will run into trouble (a torrent program swapping big chunks in and out comes to mind). The "free" amount is not decisive, you should check Page Faults to see if paging is working well or not.

Pentium 4? Athlon 64 X2? These platforms are so old it might just be the end of the road for them. Very difficult to troubleshoot them, as comparable hardware is just about non-existent at this point. Doubt the current releases of either Firefox or Vuze (not to mention your antivirus+firewall) are geared to support them. :S

I would suggest going to the ESR, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/, to see if that would work. New Firefox versions + other programs running in parallel might just not be doable with the horsepower and feature set you have at your disposal.

You could also try an alternative Torrent client to see if that helps. I don't know which has the smallest memory footprint, personally I use Tixati.

When do I look to "check Page Faults", please?

Thank you very much for the ESR suggestion, I'll look into it.

Thankfully Vuze's impact on my system resources is quite light.

I don't know if XP has the Resource Monitor, but you can find it in Seven in a couple of ways: 1) Open Start Menu and start typing in Resource Monitor. It should pop up. Select Resource Monitor. 2) Start Task Manager. Go to the Performance tab. There should be a Resource Monitor button at the bottom of the view. Press that button.

In Resource Monitor, head to the Memory tab and you should see Hard Faults/sec being tracked on the right-hand side. Pay attention to their number and frequency as you start and run your programs. A few dozen Faults are not unexpected when starting programs, but a high number of Faults appearing constantly tells of an overworked system that can't cache information fast enough. A full cache leads to congestion and commands not being processed fast enough, which may crash programs - leak or no leak.

You can also see your Physical Memory in the bottom, note the Free and Standby portions indicated here. This is why the "free" memory reported by other programs (even Task Manager) is not the whole picture - memory in Standby has to be checked and freed for use before it can be used again (and not all of it can), Free memory is immediately available.

For comparison, see the attachment. This is what my Resource Monitor shows when I launch Firefox when working (cold launch, no Firefox instances running).