Sometimes khugepaged gets involved too (which seems to be a commonly-reported problem by itself w/ VMWare), but that may be coincidental and not be directly related to the Mozilla conflict.
Adding a "Me too" with 2 additional notes: Thunderbird does the same thing. If I have FF & TB running, it's TB that usually takes the hit. Typically both VMWare (vmx) and Mozilla processes wi...
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Adding a "Me too" with 2 additional notes: Thunderbird does the same thing. If I have FF & TB running, it's TB that usually takes the hit. Typically both VMWare (vmx) and Mozilla processes will show elevated CPU when it's happening. Often other programs will stay responsive, but sometimes the entire X display will hang for a while before it's released. Often Compiz CPU% rises too, but not as dramatically. It seems to be a lot worse with an EduBuntu server VM than a W2k machine (both of which are running most of the time). This was really bad for a while last year, then it got better, now it seems to be a lot worse again after upgrading both VMWare Ubuntu . Not certain it's related. Canonical also pushed out an updated nvidia driver around the same time, IIRC. Current versions: Ubuntu 15.10 w/ Unity Workstation 12 nVidia 352.63