What would cause Firefox to hang up for 5-10 seconds with great frequency?

Question

There is a lagtime of at least several seconds before Firefox responds to any input (scroll bar, mouse over hyperlink, type in textbox, etc.), but the problem isn't showing up in any other apps. It will also frequently display the (Not Responding) message above the menu bar for a couple of seconds, before it responds. What might cause this?

Answer 1

Hey Bobby_Ko,
Today is your lucky day! I was planning on posting about this tomorrow, but will do so now. In fact, I started to have a similar problem with Chrome, even though it didn't manifest itself in quite the same way as in FF8. Somebody suggested doing changing the margins in the scroll event, and, after a bit of fiddling with it today, I fixed it in Chrome. On a hunch, I tried turning Hardware Acceleration on again in FF8, and, amazingly, that problem was fixed as well! So, here's the code I wrote - well, pseudo-code, since I'm at home and don't have the source handy:
// add this event listener to each scrolling DIV inside your outer
// scrolling DIV/IFRAME
$("innerDiv").addEventListener("scroll", myScrollHandler, true);
function myScrollHandler(e) {
var mov = ($("outerDiv").scrollTop == 0 ? -1 : 1);
$("outerDiv").scrollTop -= mov;
$("outerDiv").scrollTop += mov;
Hope this helps, Jim