So I was trying to watch some adult videos (and I don’t mean sophisticated) but they kept freezing. Now I have a lot of fetishes but stuttering women isn’t one of them.

Problem:

Windows Task Manager showed CPU usage spiking 100%. However, the memory usage for each program was unchanged.

At first I thought it was some sort of virus, so I ran a bunch of different anti-virus software but that didn’t help. Fortunately, I found this nifty tool: Process Explorer (download), which gives much more detailed information than Task Manager. It shows up-to-the-second CPU usage for each program. Turns out: Firefox was raping my CPU!

Solution:

1. Disable & Remove add-ons. The only add-on I had running was “Firebug” so I disabled that. And since the problem started around the time I updated the (disabled) add-on “NoScript” I removed that one altogether.
2. Type “about:config” in the address bar and change ”urlclassifier.updatecachemax” from -1 to 104857600. This increases maximum cache size for SQLite to 100MB and cuts down on the amount of disk activity required during an update.
3. While still in “about:config” change “network.prefetch-next” to false. Prefetch uses idle time to “prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future.”

Result:

I currently have 30 tabs open in Firefox but now it’s using only 4% of the CPU and spikes are negligible. Now the only whores on this computer are the actual whores!

Don’t be that guy, fix Firefox!