Firefox Lag spikes, CPU usuage jump

[Boyiee]

So for a while now I've been getting these really annoying lag spikes in firefox. It happens mostly when I type, or at least I notice it most there, in fact it just happend a second ago.

These lag spikes last like 0.5-1sec at least and happen every 10-30seconds. They happen during streaming videos, happen when I type. For example I'll be typing and looking at the message I'm typing, and suddenly the cursor stops moving and I'm still typing, about a second or 2 later the words that I was typing appear.

This is really frustrating, I don't know what causes it. I have a pretty new computer, 3.2core2duo processor, 4gig ram, rampage mobo, etc. These don't seem to be the problem. When in task manager to see when this is happening, memory stays the same but firefox will jump from like 1-3 CPU usage, up to 50+. I could be running nothing in the backround, or a ton of things, either way still happens. I do use noscript and adblock, as well as I guess a theme or whatever you call it... I will try disabling the theme but I'm not going to go browsing around without noscript/adblock.

Anyone have any ideas, or has been through this? I found 2 other cases of the identical thing on google, both went about 3 replies long, one with a moderator replying with a few questions, but no responses after that and no solutions I saw.

Thanks.

[Cephius]

Firefox lag spikes are usually due to an add-on doing something it isn't supposed to. Try disabling all your addons and see if it continues to happen.

[Olo401]

It's either one of the memleaks in Firefox or something funky going on with the flash plugin.

[Boyiee]

I'm at work now so can't play with it more, went back to the default theme and looked through my addons. Adblock doesn't work with 3.5.5 or whatever so it's not that but I'll uninstall anyway, I do have an AVG thing installed and it could be that. I'll try process of elimination when I get home from work at 7am, we'll see what happens.

Thanks for the input.

[Caiyuo]

It may the same problem Epical had in a previous wherein I *think* this was the solution. The problem was caused by Firefox's Session Restore feature updating the currently open tabs too frequently (every 10 seconds or so):

Perhaps this could be of help to you (I can't post url's so i'll just copy the article):

"Have you noticed, that sometimes Flash-based videos stutter when you view them in Firefox, but work fine in other browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari? This appears to be a problem with Firefox's session restore feature that affects both Windows and Mac versions. So what's the solution? Well, you can either turn off the session restore feature altogether or simply lengthen the period of time between snapshots. To do this, type about:config into Firefox's address bar, then in filter box enter browser.sessionstore.interval. The default value is 10000 (10 seconds), which is the number of milliseconds between snapshots. Setting the number to 120000 lengthens the period to two minutes, a more reasonable but still useful period. Of course, you can set it to whatever you want, as long as you keep in mind that you're dealing with milliseconds."

http://www.bluegartr.com/forum/showthread.php?t=83711

[Boyiee]

Will that affect the "speeding up firefox" where you change values in about:config to make it faster?

[Caiyuo]

What do you mean by speeding up?

What that quote was saying is that the about:config entry uses too small a time-frame and causes spikes/stuttering, and to remedy it try increasing the value to space out the session restore slightly. Currently mine is set to 120000, which updates every 2 minutes instead of every 10 seconds.