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Another potential FF issue...

Mav
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Another potential FF issue...

Thought it best to start a new thread for this:
Since the last FF updates after 3.6 through to 6.0 I seem to have the occasional period where the boot HDD is accessed so frequently the light is permanantly on and everything slows to a crawl.
My feelings is that it has something to do with FF but am unsure why.
I have 6GB of RAM and plenty of free HDD space (currently 135 of 465GB) on drive C. Looking at the Resource monitor graphs only the C drive is being accessed and none of the other 11.
Looking at Performance you can see that at times Free RAM is zero and in the Applications tab FF is not repsonding.
This will contune until I quit FF from the task manager. Even then it often continues until i quit scvhots.exe that showing second on the list in Processes.
There doesn't seem to be one thing that triggers it off: this time I simply double-clicked on a 4GB mkv file to watch in VLC player. Other times it has happened after refreshing a FF page. Often I get a message that a FF script has stopped running.
I have done full scans with AVG, Windows Defender, SpyBot S&D, Malwarebytes, Adaware and Cleaner and nothing untoward has been found. Even did a Scan using the Online scanner from MicroTrends and still nothing found so that's why I am thinking it's FF.
Of course, I could just uninstall FF and see if the problem recurs but I was wondering if anyone else has any ideas on this.
Edit: In the time it has taken to write this and save the screenshots everything has calmed down (See resourceMonitor 2 pic)

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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear - Mark Twain
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4 REPLIES 4
ejs
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Re: Another potential FF issue...

I recommend getting Process Explorer and possibly even Process Monitor from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/default.aspx
Process Explorer will show you which services are being run by that svchost.exe.
You could try limiting the size of Firefox's cache to something smallish.
Mav
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Re: Another potential FF issue...

Thanks ejs.
Coincidently it just ahhpened again just after downloading and running the above two apps.
Now it seems to be Explrer frantically accessing the disc.
I have attached a screen-shot from Process Explorer but am unsure about how to get any further useful info from it.
Any help would be appreciated.

Forum Moderator and Customer
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear - Mark Twain
He who feared he would not succeed sat still

Mav
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Moderator
Posts: 22,369
Thanks: 4,725
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Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: Another potential FF issue...

I'm wondering if this may have anything to do with the Green Ribbon of Death seen in both Vista and W7.
I have noticed this happening occasionally at the same time as the above. Then again, it happens at other times, too. So frustrating when the ribbon is so close to the end and appears to halt making Explorer unresponsive for a while.
It happens with both Indexing on and off. I have now turned off Thumbnails for all folders and will see what happens.

Forum Moderator and Customer
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear - Mark Twain
He who feared he would not succeed sat still

ejs
Aspiring Hero
Posts: 5,442
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Registered: ‎10-06-2010

Re: Another potential FF issue...

In Process Explorer, on the View menu you can change the "Lower Pane View" to "Handles", then the bottom section will display the list of things a process has open, amongst other things this includes what files it has open.
If you move the mouse over a svchost.exe in the top bit, the tooltip lists what services it is running.