Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 187883
Firefox slows my desktop to a crawl and has to be killed.
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:29 EST
Description of problem: Firefox slows to a crawl occasionally when I'm using the kernel-smp. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 1.5.0.1 How reproducible: Not under my control, but it has happened 3 times in a short period. Steps to Reproduce: 1.Use Firefox for surfing. 2.Keep the Desktop Search (beagle) running with a query like 'grass' active. 3.Surf, surf, and surf. And Firefox will slow to a crawl. 4.Kill the Firefox application and everything goes back to normal. Actual results: Firefox becomes such a bastard that the mouse barely moves across the screen, and menus take forever to load (in a desperate attempt to get to System Monitor to kill Firefox). Expected results: No maxed out CPU usage problems while using Firefox. Additional info: I would like to exclude Beagle as the problem, because once Firefox has been killed Beagle continues to run and the reloaded Firefox does not cause problems for maybe another day. I'm sure that my description is of little help, so it would be a good idea to keep this bug open. Others and myself might be able to narrow the problem. The other quirk is so far it only happens on the smp-kernel, which I've used as much as the regular kernel. I have a hyper-threaded intel 3.0 GHz chip so the smp-kernel and the regular kernel appear on Grub. Though I can't see why the kernel-smp would be a problem. I also have the flash plugin installled, but no other extensions or themes.
It doesn't gradually slow to a crawl, it just happens in a moment. Could be that moment occurs when I open a link in a new tab.
This sounds similar to the bug I raised (bug 197535).
I too have flash installed (although none of the pages I'm visiting are flash ones. Also, I don't use Beagle. However, consistently, every time I open a page in a new window, if you run "top" in a terminal window, you'll see firefox-bin consume 99% of the CPU for 8-10 seconds. It'll then render the contents of the new window, and then the CPU will drop back to normal.
Fedora Core 5 is no longer supported, could you please reproduce this with the updated version of the currently supported distribution (Fedora Core 6, or Fedora 7, or Rawhide)? If this issue turns out to still be reproducible, please let us know in this bug report. If after a month's time we have not heard back from you, we will have to close this bug as CANTFIX. Setting status to NEEDINFO, and awaiting information from the reporter. Thanks in advance.
We haven't got any reply to the last question about reproducability of the bug with Fedora Core 6, Fedora 7, or Fedora devel. Mass closing this bug, so if you have new information that would help us fix this bug, please reopen it with the additional information.