Webdriver firefox-bin uses excessive amount of CPU

Question

I am running a single test (FirefoxDriveR)which visits all links on a given domain.

OS: Ubuntu 9.10 Memory: 4GB HD: 500GB 10 mbp/s line

Observing the following via command TOP

11001 hudson    20   0  508m 108m  28m S   64  2.8   2:31.58 firefox-bin
10937 hudson    20   0 1277m  73m 9772 S    6  1.8   0:21.93 java
10929 hudson    20   0 43820  10m 3440 S    3  0.3   0:06.25 Xvnc

64% CPU Consumption via firefox-bin. Anyway I can reduce this ?

Answer 1

On a 3Ghz machine, I see firefox using in the range from 25-40% CPU when running at full blast through a site. Remember that firefox is effectively an execution environment for code. So page efficiency corrolates to CPU usage on the host.

Standard tricks for optimizing javascript, css and page rendering apply here, this is not about webdriver as such, although you can expect a baseline for reasonably efficient pages around 30%