firefox engages in very long paging operations

[Albert Cardona]

Binary package hint: firefox

In ubuntu 8.04, firefox-3.0 is the default. After using it in several sessions, I observe the following: for no particular reason and independent of the number of tabs or windows open, firefox blocks all I/O operations in the laptop and a 'top' command reveals it is heavily paging. This behaviour occurs even when on battery, and lasts for nearly a minute, which is most disruptive.

My system is not exactly short on RAM: 2 Gb DDR2.

Thinkpad T60p core 2 duo 2.2 Ghz.

Some information:

$ apt-cache policy firefox
firefox:
  Installed: 3.0~b5+nobinonly-0ubuntu3
  Candidate: 3.0~b5+nobinonly-0ubuntu3
  Version table:
 *** 3.0~b5+nobinonly-0ubuntu3 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[defishguy (mkfischer)]

Confirmed. Dell 1505n. FF3 begins arduous paging simply by launching the app. Clicking links also causes prolonged greying. This problem appeared today (as of this writing).

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 12:27:13PM -0000, Kelvin Gardiner wrote:
> ** Changed in: firefox-3.0 (Ubuntu)
> Sourcepackagename: firefox => firefox-3.0
>

duplicate of high CPU/IO usage bug

 tag likely-dup
 status incomplete

 - Alexander

[Albert Cardona (cardona)]

Could you provide the id of the bug you think this is a duplicate of?

Also: the reported paging behaviour of firefox has ended. All I did different: I installed firefox-2, run it for a bit (half-broken, since add-ons are apparently shared), and then run again firefox-3 --now without paging episodes.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 04:50:11PM -0000, Albert Cardona wrote:
> Could you provide the id of the bug you think this is a duplicate of?
>
> Also: the reported paging behaviour of firefox has ended. All I did
> different: I installed firefox-2, run it for a bit (half-broken, since
> add-ons are apparently shared), and then run again firefox-3 --now
> without paging episodes.
>

we recently rolled a fix for the CPU/IO bug ... thats most likely what
you see.

FWIW, the bug of concern here is bug #215728 - "[MASTER] Committing to
urlclassifier3.sqlite causes excessive CPU usage and disk I/O"

 duplicate 215728

 - Alexander