I noticed my Firefox browser grounded to a near halt after a recent update. I would get errors when pages would download or sometime it would freeze all together. I noticed one day that when this happened my SETI BOINC software would also stop working. The task would say "CPU Busy" (or words to that effect).

I usually have SETI BOINC running the background on my PC when I work. Today I totally shut down the client and the performance of the Firefox browser dramatically improved. No more crashes and all webpages I access are flowing fine.

Anyone seen this before?

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While Firefox isn't the most resource-heavy browser, could it be your Computing Preferences are set to use 100% of your CPU 100% of the time?
Or perhaps that under Activity, your preference is set to Always use CPU?

In light of you mentioning the BOINC Manager also grinding to a halt, is your Firefox Browser trying to update itself perhaps?

I see you're running work on your GPU as well. This can account for severe slowdowns in rendering, because that same GPU is used to draw everything on the monitor. This is why the default preference for using the GPU is set to "only use when computer is idle".

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