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I use a lot of addins in my Firefox. One of them is causing periodic freezes when watching video. Super annoying.

Aside from doing a binary search of disabling addins to narrow down the problem (which would take a very long time due to frequency of the freezes), are there any other options?

If the problem came from the native app, then I'd just load up a profiler and see where the time is going. But it's all in Javascript.

Are there any tools that exist to help figure this out? Maybe some instrumentation I can throw on a few key source files in a local build to help diagnose the problem?

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    BTW, you've made sure it's an add-on for sure by running Firefox in Safe Mode, right?
    – Nathaniel
    Apr 5, 2010 at 0:17
  • That would disable video, wouldn't it?
    – scobi
    Apr 13, 2010 at 4:56

2 Answers 2

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It depends.

1) It could be your OS.

Are you on Linux? Then you will have poor flash performance, and there really is not rhyme or reason as to when/why. I will see flash burning up one of my CPU cores, and the only remedy is to kill firefox and revisit the page, which usually works.

2) As for add ons.

The popular and updated addons usually perform pretty well. Their dev(s) tend to bug fixes and clear up memory leaks. As for the lesser maintained add ons, you can use this extention to alert you of possible memory leaks: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2490

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  • A note to anyone who lands here via Google: These days, Firefox runs plugins via a separate process, so you don't have to kill your entire firefox to restart Flash. (I believe it's called plugin-container. On 64-bit Linux, you'll probably want to kill npviewer.bin instead, since you'll probably have a setup with an extra layer of wrapping to run 32-bit Flash in 64-bit Firefox)
    – ssokolow
    Feb 5, 2012 at 23:13
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first, try to disable Java and/or Flash plugin, these two are where most problems coming from

second, watch your error console the buggy addon usually give out lots of errors and warnings

third, good luck!

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