Firefox chokes up for several seconds... frequently

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <20140604195803.GJ2341 at home.opsec.eu>, 
Kurt Jaeger <lists at opsec.eu> wrote:

>Hi!
>
>> > I spoke too soon.
>> >
>> > The problem is back again.
>> >
>> > As a friend of mine used to say "Problems that go away by themselves
>> > come back by themselves".
>[...]
>> Try changing "gfx.xrender.enabled" from True to False in about:config.  
>> This solved a similar problem with scaled images for me a couple years ago.
>
>I have seen the same problem (freezes for several seconds)
>and changed this config.

OK, I changed it.  Now I guess I'll see what happens.

>My firefox process currently has 3.6 GB RAM with 3.1 GB RSS (!)

Jesus!  Yes!  Mine is showing up (under top) as follows:

  PID USERNAME      THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE   C   TIME   WCPU COMMAND
58591 rfg            47  52    0  2811M  2328M uwait   2 690:23 44.19% firefox

Jesus!  2.8 GIGABYTES !?!?!?!

No wonder the thing runs like a pig.  Probably half of it is swapped out
at any given time.

What the hell could it possibly be using so much memory for?  Is it trying
to cache every blessed last bit of crap it has received??

>That was much better in the past. I had firefox running for several
>month with heavy browsing. Now I need to restart it every 1-2 weeks.

Have you mentioned this to anybody?  I mean like, you know, anbody who
is involved with Firefox development?

>Hmm, one thing: I had gnash-0.8.10_10 installed. Deleted it now.

I don't have any gnash\* anything installed.