Lockup Every Hour

I love FireFox, and particularly its LiveBookmark support of RSS feeds, and only slightly less its Tabbed Browsing. I even wrote several articles on it, including this and this.

But there is one thing about Firefox which really makes me mad. Every hour my computer locks up for about 5 minutes, with almost 100% CPU utilization, interleaved with short periods when the CPU utilization seems to drop off, but I still cant use my machine, because the Hard Drive is being accesses solidly. All of this is caused by Firefox updating my RSS feeds. I do have a large number of Live Bookmarks (RSS Feeds), but then that is the reason I use Firefox in the first place.

I certainly have reported the problem, but what else is there I can do? I finally decided to create this blog, in the hopes that others having the same problem could post their problems here as well, and maybe we can persuade someone to tackle these problems.

In my case, it would seem to me very reasonable if rather than just bitspinning while it is updating the RSS feeds, I wish the Firefox programmers would create a separate task to do the job, and give it a very low priority. It might not update as fast, but it could do its updates without disturbing what I am doing.

If for some reason they can't do that, then could they not make the one hour refresh a configurable time. If I could set the refresh to only happen every four hours, I could go eat lunch, or something like that, whenever they felt they needed to do an update. But not every 60 minutes, please.