Bug#563106: iceweasel locks up system after saving multiple files to disk drive

[Mike Hommey]

On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 11:27:43AM -0500, Gary Dale wrote:
> Mike Hommey wrote:
> >On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 04:33:48PM -0500, Gary Dale wrote:
> >>Package: iceweasel
> >>Version: 3.5.6-1
> >>Severity: important
> >>
> >>When I save a page with multiple elements on it, or save multiple
> >>pages with a few elements on it, or just save the elements (graphics
> >>mainly, I guess), iceweasel starts to slow my system down. If I
> >>catch it quickly enough, I can stop the slowdown by shutting down
> >>iceweasel then restarting it. If not, the systems becomes
> >>increasingly unresponsive until it eventually hangs or spontaneously
> >>reboots.
> >>
> >>This is a real pain right now because I'm submitting online job
> >>applications and I save a copy of each job ad locally. The pages
> >>aren't the most visual things I've ever seen, but even saving one
> >>appears to be sufficient to start the slowdown.
> >>
> >>I've noticed the same thing on other sites where I don't save the
> >>page - just individual elements from the page.
> >>
> >>Simply browsing without saving doesn't trigger the problem. It's the
> >>saving locally that seems to be the culprit. And it appears to
> >>become noticeable somewhere at around 10 - 20 files saved.
> >
> >Could you try to take a look at the system cpu and memory usage while
> >doing so, and how it evolves ? How much memory do you have on your
> >computer ? What kind of pages are you trying to save ? Are they massive
> >?
> >
> >Thanks
> >
> >Mike
> It's probably time I started using a swap file again. :)
> 
> It turns out that with a 1G Windows XP virtual machine running, I'm
> down to about 25M of free RAM. Saving files seems to use that
> amount, which then puts the system into some kind brain-freeze until
> the window manager restarts, killing the child processes that were
> using all the memory.
> 
> It's interesting that firefox-bin causes this memory overload while
> programs like Dolphin, OpenOffice.org, Icedove and the gimp run
> without substantially impacting my free memory. However, saving
> files in Iceweasel seems to chew up free memory. I can load up my
> system with lots of programs and open files and still have about 25M
> of free memory.
> 
> 
> I've got 4G of DDR2. Firefox-bin is a major CPU user when my system
> goes into the slowing-down-then-freezing-and-restarting mode, but
> it's not always the largest. The pages I'm saving are actually
> fairly lightweight. They're mainly about 1 legal-size page of text.

I've got that much memory, running iceweasel almost permanently, and it
doesn't suck my memory. Have you tried running in safe-mode and without
plugins ? (See /usr/share/bug/iceweasel/presubj)

Mike