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From: Jack Dodds on 27 Dec 2009 16:50
My system is a 1.8 GHz Pentium using Debian stable. I update frequently
from debian.org.

Several weeks ago, I started noticing that Iceweasel would sometimes
stop responding to mouse or keyboard inputs for about five seconds.
After each such "hang" it would resume operating normally.

For example, while reading a web page I would try to scroll down by
clicking on the down arrow at the bottom of the scroll bar. Nothing
would happen, so I would click once or twice again, with no response.
After a few seconds, the window would suddenly scroll to the bottom of
the page - as if responding to all the backlogged mouse clicks.

I could not identify the problem with any particular software install or
update. Of course, the problem may have been happening for weeks before
I noticed the pattern of "hangs".

After some Googling, I thought the problem might be related to Java or
Flash, so in Edit-Preferences I disabled Java, and I installed
Flashblock 5.1.11.2. This appeared to have no effect on the frequency
with which the hangs occurred.

Also I tried to identify the problem with specific web sites. I most
often had the problem on newspaper websites, e.g.
www.theglobeandmail.com, but it seemed to occur intermittently on other
sites as well. Because of the random nature of the problem I have not
been able to decide whether it occurs on all websites or just some websites.

To further isolate the problem I ran top in a Gnome terminal. To be
specific, I ran terminal, su'ed to root, then

lucy:/home/jack# nice --adjustment=-20 top

I arranged the windows so that I could use iceweasel without covering up
the terminal window, then browsed until a "hang" happened.

What this showed was that during a "hang", iceweasel (firefox-bin) was
using close to 100% of the CPU. However, this did not stop the terminal
or any other application from responding. In fact, further testing
showed that during a hang, if I was quick, I could go to another
application window, use the mouse or keyboard and get a response, then
return to iceweasel, and iceweasel would still not respond until after a
significant delay.

By going to the terminal window that had top running, and hitting ^C
during a "hang", I captured the following top output - which is typical
of what I saw during hangs:

top - 15:57:35 up 28 days, 19:23, 3 users, load average: 0.66, 0.62, 0.47
Tasks: 173 total, 3 running, 170 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 96.7%us, 2.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.3%si,
0.0%st
Mem: 775980k total, 763664k used, 12316k free, 16904k buffers
Swap: 9767512k total, 118268k used, 9649244k free, 372708k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+
COMMAND
6895 jack 20 0 216m 125m 21m R 93.0 16.5 2:48.19
firefox-bin
6027 root 10 -10 114m 26m 7460 S 6.6 3.5 5:04.60
Xorg
7022 root 0 -20 2520 1176 884 R 0.7 0.2 0:00.10
top
1 root 20 0 2100 428 400 S 0.0 0.1 0:21.94
init

If anyone can identify this problem, or offer suggestions about how to
further narrow it down, I would appreciate it.

Jack Dodds





From: Wu-Kung Sun on 27 Dec 2009 18:40
I would suggest browsing in safe mode. If the problem persists, file
a bug. If not, create a new profile and one at time add the same
addons from your other profile until the problem shows up again.


--
swk


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From: Mark Allums on 27 Dec 2009 20:00
On 12/27/2009 3:16 PM, Jack Dodds wrote:
> My system is a 1.8 GHz Pentium using Debian stable. I update frequently
> from debian.org.
>
> Several weeks ago, I started noticing that Iceweasel would sometimes
> stop responding to mouse or keyboard inputs for about five seconds.
> After each such "hang" it would resume operating normally.
>


To further isolate the problem I ran top in a Gnome terminal. To be
> specific, I ran terminal, su'ed to root, then
>
> lucy:/home/jack# nice --adjustment=-20 top
>
> I arranged the windows so that I could use iceweasel without covering up
> the terminal window, then browsed until a "hang" happened.
>
> What this showed was that during a "hang", iceweasel (firefox-bin) was
> using close to 100% of the CPU. However, this did not stop the terminal
> or any other application from responding. In fact, further testing
> showed that during a hang, if I was quick, I could go to another
> application window, use the mouse or keyboard and get a response, then
> return to iceweasel, and iceweasel would still not respond until after a
> significant delay.


I have some hangs too, the slowdowns include moving from non-Windows to
Windows, and also when MS Security Essentials is installed. This is
true for Thunderbird 2.x and Thunderbird 3.0, as well as Firefox and
Iceweasel. But not Outlook or non-mozilla.

It feels like a garbage collector or defragmenting. Something similar
has been happening to my Kindle* since it updated to ver. 2.3.

Mark Allums

*Amazon Kindles run ARM Linux, although not Debian.




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From: Kevin Ross on 27 Dec 2009 22:30
Jack Dodds wrote:
> If anyone can identify this problem, or offer suggestions about how to
> further narrow it down, I would appreciate it.
>
> Jack Dodd

How much memory is Iceweasel using when it starts acting up? Firefox on
my Windows machine does the same, when I have about 20 tabs open and
it's using about 1.5 GB of memory.


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From: Jack Dodds on 28 Dec 2009 00:00
Hello Sun,

Thank you for telling me about safe mode - I did not know about it.

Sure enough, the problem seems to disappear in safe mode.

I compared my profile with another user's profile. That user had not
noticed the "hang" problem. The only difference in the profiles is that
the other profile did not have Torbutton. So I uninstalled Torbutton
from my profile. After 1 hour of use, I have not noticed the "hang"
problem.

Checking further, I found that I did not have Debian package
iceweasel-torbutton installed on my system. I must have installed it
direct from the mozilla website, which may have caused the problem.

After some further testing, I will install the Debian
iceweasel-torbutton package and see if I can use it without problems.

Thanks also to the others who commented.

Jack Dodds


Wu-Kung Sun wrote:
> I would suggest browsing in safe mode. If the problem persists, file
> a bug. If not, create a new profile and one at time add the same
> addons from your other profile until the problem shows up again.
>
>
>

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