[ubuntu-uk] Firefox hogging the processor

[Colin Law]

HI

Using up to date 13.10 32 bit I occasionally see Firefox hogging my processor.
The first I notice is
that the fan on my laptop starts running at high speed.  If I then
look at the processor utilisation I see that FF is fully consuming one
of the four cores.  If I keep watching then over a minute or two it
uses more and more processor till it is using all of the cores.  If I
then close down all the FF windows the windows disappear but the FF process
remains running flat out.  I have to kill the process manually.  Then
I can restart FF and all is well again.  I *think* that when it
happens it is usually (or always) just after startup of FF.

Unfortunately this only happens around once a week so it is difficult
to diagnose.  I have the standard plugins plus Adblock Plus,
Flashblock, Ghostery, Googlebar Lite, and Reminderfox.  I don't want
to disable them to see if that fixes it as it might run for over a
week without problems anyway and I don't want to have to run without
them.  I have started keeping a note of which sites are open when it
fails, but I think the only contenders so far are gmail and google+.

Everything else on the PC appears to run fine.

I can't find anything on launchpad.  Any suggestions anyone?

Colin