I use Firefox as a primary browser. I always use the latest available version of Firefox, so the current installed version in my system is 3.0.1.
After updating Firefox to 3.0.1, it started to consume more than 95% CPU. That's very bad for any application. I used Process Explorer to get some details about firefox process. I found that the firefox process started a thread "WINMM.dll!timeGetSystem Time+0x44" which was consuming more CPU time.
I suspended that thread using process explorer.
Now, the CPU utilization is around 5%.
I tried this two times. As you can see in the above "CPU Usage History", CPU Usage became very less after suspending "WINMM.dll!timeGetSystem Time+0x44" thread.
I am not sure about internals of firefox, but this may give some hint on fixing the CPU consumption issue.
8/19/2008 04:36:00 AM
WinMM, I understand that it's a windows media player plugin. Once you suspend, you can't play those embeded video or music. Anyway, I choose to suspend it too.
11/01/2008 09:19:00 AM
I made the same discovery, except that I simply killed the WinMM thread, rather than suspending it. Firefox immediately became snappy instead of painfully slow.
It works on Opera, too (which has the same problem).
(BTW, I'm using a 1 GHz Win2K machine with 2 GB RAM.)
Dave Burton
Cary, NC
11/08/2008 01:01:00 PM
Dave, it worked for IE too. I was using IE7.0 at that time. It is strange that media player plugin continues to hog processor even while it is not directly in use.