Why is Snap Firefox using so much cpu time?

Cor Blufon

1/5/24, 6:44 PM

Firefox and other browsers use a lot of CPU time and memory, however, since forcing us to use Snap Firefox, CPU time is through the roof. Way too much CPU time when viewing Youtube and other video sites. I hope this is being addressed.

724

2 + 3

firefox

cpu

snap

mook765

1/5/24, 7:35 PM

The firefox snap is published by mozilla, it's a free offer, you are not forced to use it at all. A deb version is still available from ppa, see [this answer](https://askubuntu.com/a/1404401/590937). Feel free (not forced) to try that out but I doubt the deb version will use less CPU than the snap. Your question also lacks details about your hardware and CPU time you complain about. "through the roof" is nothing we can work with...

thomasrutter

2/14/24, 4:45 AM

This question is not related to Ubuntu so isn't relevant here, but if it were, when asking for technical help you need to give more information. For example if asking about high CPU usage, show the CPU usage in a screenshot or console or something, show how it's being measured and what negative effects it's having. And what you are doing when there is high CPU usage. Also consider that high CPU usage is natural when software is doing something - lower CPU usage would mean tasks take longer.

Rinzwind

4/28/24, 7:19 AM

I agree with above 2 comments. This is lacking in detail. A lot.

Score:2

Ubuntu

Pilot6

1/5/24, 6:46 PM

It is not related to snap. Browsers use a lot of CPU time when rendering video, because accelerated by GPU video decoding is disabled for Linux for various reasons. It may change in some time. But this is not a place for feature requests.

+ 0

Score:2

Ubuntu

pclark36

2/14/24, 4:36 AM

I came to this post searching for a similar issue. On my setup, I do see what he is seeing, but without running youtube video running on an older Skull Canyon NUC with 16GB of RAM.

Running fully updated Xubuntu 22.04 and the latest Firefox snap, having 4 pinned tabs open would peg out just over 1 core constantly per htop (about 128% constantly). The tabs were gmail, feedly, YNAB, and personal capital sitting static. If I left my browser open, I would come in the office with the fan going pretty hard. Close the browser, immediate cooldown.

As mook765 pointed out, You can install firefox via PPA. I tried this with firefox-esr 102.8.0esr, and right now with those 4 same tabs open, depending on how much I'm typing into this window, I'm only using between 0.5% and 3.2% with small spikes higher.

My experience is anecdotal, but I would say your answer would be to try the PPA. If 'rapid' firefox from the PPA shows the same issue, it might be some of the newer features that need to have bugs ironed out, and then I'd file a bug report with Mozilla, and then try the ESR to see if that alleviates. I didn't try the rapid, as I like ESR versions, and their stability. Were this my issue, I'd flag mook's comment as the answer.

+ 0

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Why is Snap Firefox using so much cpu time?

Post an answer

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