High CPU Usage while viewing Dashboard with Firefox 3

Strange. I just checked again and today the dashboard works like a charm (CPU <5>ll keep an eye open if some weird combination of actions triggers that cpu usage again.

Sorry for being inactive for such a long time, I just wanted to give you an update on the issue. I still experience high CPU usage when viewing the dashboard.
I tried to identify when it works and when it won't. My observations so far are that most of the time a "stand-by / wake-up" cycle leaves my laptop (ThinkPad T43p running WinXP) in a state where it works. As soon as I start some media app (iTunes, WindowsMediaPlayer, even youtube or other sites that embed flash-players) the cpu usage of firefox goes up (only when the dashboard is displayed).
btw. interesting enough a full restart leaves the laptop in a state where it does not work. So I guess something in stand-by/wake-up is broken on my Laptop - and that error somehow counters the other problem.

As I workaround I disabled/minimized some of the graphs on the dashboard and that helps a lot (especially disabling the Score-graph). I'm down to 10% CPU usage with only "Time Spent", "Goals" and "Apps&Sites" active on the dashboard.

I inspected the firefox process in ProcessExplorer (Tool from Sysinternals) and extracted the following stack information:

ntkrnlpa.exe!KiDispatchInterrupt+0x7f
ntkrnlpa.exe!MmIsNonPagedSystemAddressValid+0x93
ntkrnlpa.exe!NtFreeVirtualMemory+0x59bf
ntkrnlpa.exe!NtFreeVirtualMemory+0x62c7
ntkrnlpa.exe!KeReleaseInStackQueuedSpinLockFromDpcLevel+0xb14
ntdll.dll!KiFastSystemCallRet
kernel32.dll!VirtualQuery+0x15
kernel32.dll!SetThreadContext+0x44
kernel32.dll!SetUnhandledExceptionFilter+0x2b
NPSWF32.dll!native_ShockwaveFlash_TCallLabel+0x743d
xul.dll!JVM_StartupJVM+0x1cb5
MSCTF.dll!TF_UninitSystem+0x9dc

Of course the stack info doesn't look the same all the time, but when the CPU usage is high than most of the time
kernel32.dll!SetUnhandledExceptionFilter+0x2b
NPSWF32.dll!native_ShockwaveFlash_TCallLabel+0x743d
is somewhere near the bottom.
Don't know if this helps.

Any news about it?

I'm a Firefox 3 user myself, but for comparison I tested the Dashboard CPU usage in Firefox 3, Chrome, and IE7: in Firefox the CPU usage went up to 45% when moving from List View to the Dashboard. Chrome used 20%. In IE7, however, the CPU usage drops to near-zero after loading the page.

I think Chrome's 20% is also way too much, so this is not just a Firefox 3 problem! I understand that Flash must use CPU power while animating the graphs, but after that it just displays a plain image of the graph. Why on earth does it need any CPU power at all to do that?! Seriously: I don't need the Flash animations, just give me plain old image maps with javascript mouse-over popups if this problem cannot be fixed. IE7's behavior indicates that a fix should be achievable, though.

So this is really a serious problem: It hinders my productivity if my CPU time is wasted -- and increasing productivity is what RescueTime is all about! :-)

My current workaround is to always select the List View when leaving the site open in the background.

I also tested the site http://www.fusioncharts.com/Demos/Blu..., and it has the same problem (FF3 CPU usage 35%, Chrome 10%), so I guess the underlying problem is in your vendor's product, either FusionCharts or the Flash plugin or both.

Even once the dashboard page is fully loaded 60-70% of my CPU is being utilized by firefox. While loading it is between 90 and 99%.
I have not noticed any other pages that cause a similar problem.

it happened to me also i had to completely uninstall utorrent because it seemed the combination of theses three thing led to high cpu usage even if i was not using utorrent at the time when i would turn it off it would still be running as a active process that would not let me end it after i uninstalled utorrent everything worked fine once i restarted my system

i would advance a hipothesis that Martin has a few distinct problems...

First of all recently flash did start to give problems to many users, flash 9 and flash 10.
high cpu usage with flash occuring for example when :
- using flash apps
- watching you tube videos (or any other video streaming site that uses a flash made player)
- online flash games
- heavy flash sites and sites containing flash banners/ads
those are browser independent simptoms.
low fps does help, but its only a kind of a half-solution

Since now there were various solutions and each of them helped many users.
I suggest testing in the following order:

1. clean uninstall of old flash version (check out manually if all files were deleted with success) and installing a new flash 10 version.

2 many Vista users got around the problem simply altering Flash's file permissions in windows/system32/macromed/flash directory (giving full perms to it)

3 The one that finally resolved mine was installing the latest Shockwave player 11 plugins together with Flash 10

- - After about 40 min's of watching a live streaming on around 30% Cpu with firefox and flash the cpu went 100% again. But it happened a few moments after my system fan went crazy. Checking out the manual (Asus a2500 notebook) I've found some simptoms of overheating which were sys vent going high, cpu slowdown for passing cooling and then shutdown. I've finally opened the thing up cleaned all the dust (a lot of it) and later seen two 90 min films in a row in streaming with absolutely no slowdowns nor cpu oscillations. b4 i was able to see only around 2 mins of it.

As of the restart thingy you mentioned. It's a Lenovo thing that hitted my r50 also, after doing 2 months of research i've found out it's a massive problem in the lenovo community mostly but ather vendors are experiencing it also.

The two solutions that were helpful in 80% of cases were:

1. opening up the laptop and checking out the motherboard for loose solders. the thing to be lloking for first is a round ??"capacitator"?? i think it was that.

2. changing right away the LCD's inverter.

In my case i didnt find anything loose on the motherboard but the problem later manifested also when turning the pc on not only when restarting and after a 2 months time the notebook's screen went really really dark .. the times i was successful to turn the damn thing on .... the joint of the backlight neon and cable attached to it catched fire (probbably the gas going out on that point). first i changed only the neon.... AND THAT'S A PAIN IN THE ASS thing to do, no luck, then changed the inverter and woila... screen working perfectly, computer restarting and fireing up with no problems.... the inverter and start up/restart problem thing shouldnt be directly connected but it seams to me (at least in my case) that the inverter going versus end of life span starts making some kind of short circuiting.

my suggestion for the start up ? Buy right away a new screen from ebay and mount it. its 3x cheaper and easyer to do

Hope this helps...
Vedran