Does anyone know how to fix this high cpu usage by a firefox subprocess called RDD Process ... or as a temporary band-aid How can I disable "RDD Process" until it gets fixed on firefox ? as a loyal ff user since its "there be dragons" days I'd hate to stop using ff however new ff users will not put up with this ff bug
here is top showing this
$ top
top - 10:46:45 up 1:33, 1 user, load average: 1.52, 1.12, 0.75
Tasks: 451 total, 1 running, 449 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
%Cpu(s): 7.1 us, 10.2 sy, 0.0 ni, 82.7 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 63964.8 total, 48381.4 free, 10170.6 used, 5412.8 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 67584.0 total, 67584.0 free, 0.0 used. 52009.7 avail Mem
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
9616 olaf 20 0 687632 124196 98824 S 167.6 0.2 8:06.11 RDD Process
11115 olaf 20 0 3478912 1.0g 142712 S 45.9 1.6 2:05.58 Isolated Web Co
9154 olaf 20 0 5345052 918880 434104 S 37.8 1.4 9:23.10 firefox-trunk
3318 olaf 20 0 7468292 375644 173560 S 8.1 0.6 4:51.18 gnome-shell
3828 root 20 0 394520 33684 27112 S 5.4 0.1 0:00.70 fwupd
19979 root 20 0 0 0 0 I 5.4 0.0 0:09.26 kworker/u32:0-i915
20667 root 20 0 0 0 0 I 5.4 0.0 0:06.43 kworker/u32:4-i915
65 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 2.7 0.0 0:00.78 ksoftirqd/8
3084 olaf 9 -11 2622692 31628 22540 S 2.7 0.0 0:25.00 pulseaudio
9014 olaf 20 0 751244 92592 66272 S 2.7 0.1 0:06.94 gnome-terminal-
This just started other day ... previously I have never seen RDD
firefox 118.0a1 (2023-08-19) (64-bit)
uname -m && uname -r && cat /etc/*release
x86_64
6.2.0-26-generic
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=22.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=jammy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS"
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS"
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION_ID="22.04"
VERSION="22.04.3 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)"
VERSION_CODENAME=jammy
and yes it did not help by resetting my local settings by issuing
rm -rf ~/.mozilla
rm -rf ~/.cache/mozilla
this is on a beefy desktop and this RDD Process was consistently using high cpu forever ... it was not a temp short lived cpu spike ... however after repeatedly killing firefox and relaunching the RDD did reappear across several such cycles ... as I write RDD Process is gone yet this entire sequence of events has repeated itself across past week or so
coincidentally with above RDD issue, youtube now sometimes fails to play a video upon clicking the video yet same video plays OK on other browsers like Vivaldi
Below answer does not solve this high cpu issue ... How can I disable "RDD Process" until it gets fixed ? I do not want a cpu core pegged all day as I continuously use firefox even when only viewing very well behaved sites like SO ... after killing ff all is OK until I try to watch a youtube video at which point cpu goes to 100% and stays pegged forever AND the youtube video fails to render
UPDATE hamburger menu -> Troubleshoot Mode -> Restart ... just to disable all addons afterwards the RDD issue goes away however I would never use ff without my addons so this is not a solution
Major fault of this RDD bug is that cpu usage increases each time I click on a youtube video in a different tab even though none of these videos plays ... the video just sits there not rendering any video after clicking on it AND this high cpu usage continues even after I click on a different tab say the tab for this SO question ... see new tab under this condition :
top - 08:04:00 up 36 min, 1 user, load average: 2.40, 2.68, 1.68
Tasks: 420 total, 1 running, 413 sleeping, 0 stopped, 6 zombie
%Cpu(s): 4.6 us, 9.5 sy, 0.0 ni, 85.8 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.1 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 63964.8 total, 49344.6 free, 6397.0 used, 8223.1 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 67584.0 total, 67584.0 free, 0.0 used. 56082.6 avail Mem
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
85851 olaf 20 0 670148 122840 96472 S 162.5 0.2 4:09.69 RDD Process
26395 olaf 20 0 4256544 673516 298232 S 20.8 1.0 4:22.72 firefox-trunk
26727 olaf 20 0 2909912 374900 134212 S 14.6 0.6 1:37.87 Isolated Web Co
66057 olaf 20 0 3264688 688376 137424 S 13.2 1.1 1:41.47 Isolated Web Co
9 root 20 0 0 0 0 I 4.9 0.0 0:18.76 kworker/u32:0-i915
827 root 20 0 0 0 0 I 4.2 0.0 0:22.57 kworker/u32:11-i915
3350 olaf 20 0 7202140 354256 163644 S 2.1 0.5 1:06.91 gnome-shell
15 root 20 0 0 0 0 I 0.7 0.0 0:01.31 rcu_preempt
41 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.7 0.0 0:01.79 ksoftirqd/4
54 root 20 0 0 0 0 I 0.7 0.0 0:03.61 kworker/6:0-events