On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 3:47 PM, Brian Wood <woodbrian77 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Normally, I can have 30 or more tabs open in Firefox and
> the top command will report that Firefox is taking less than
> 2% of the cpu.  Sometimes though, I'll run top and Firefox
> is taking more than 25% and so I'll close several of my tabs
> in an effort to find the one or so that are hogging resources.
> Are there any cpu monitoring tools I could configure to pop
> up when a process has taken a given percentage of cpu
> over a certain length of time?  Tia.

I don't know of anything quite like you describe, but could you just
leave a terminal running top in the background for a while?  Top uses
very small amounts of resources when left running in Linux. Or you
could make a cron job to run a script that uses ps, searches for
firefox processes and check their CPU usage...and e-mail you or
something if it gets over 20% or so.
Conky or GKrellm might have a pretty GUI to show the same thing.  But
beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Another rather different (and possibly undesirable) option is to
temporarily switch to Chrome or Chromium and see if you still run into
resource issues.  If you do, it creates a separate process for each
tab, so you can more easily isolate which tab is misbehaving.  A
couple downsides are that you would have to switch browsers and
configure Chrome to your liking, and also Chrome tends to use more
resources than Firefox because of its process isolation...the very
thing that makes it desirable for debugging an issue like this.  It
might be worth a shot, though.
- Justin