firefox 3.6.3 freezes regularly and becomes unusable

[rsidd]

Binary package hint: firefox

With the latest update to firefox on lucid (3.6.3+nobinonly-0ubuntu4) I find it freezing so often as to be unusable. The freezing seems correlated with disk activity: when the strigi indexer was running, firefox was utterly unresponsive, but even after stopping strigi with a mostly idle disk, it is very sluggish and slow to respond. Konqueror and Google Chrome remain fast and responsive. My impression is that the problem did not occur with the previous version of firefox in lucid. It is reminiscent of the ext3+fsync problem in firefox 3.0, but much worse (I don't know whether it is fsync-related this time).
Package: 3.6.3+nobinonly-0ubuntu4
Kernel: Linux aoxomoxoa 2.6.32-21-generic #32-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 16 08:09:38 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: firefox 3.6.3+nobinonly-0ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-21.32-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-21-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia wl
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Apr 28 12:49:16 2010
FirefoxPackages:
 firefox 3.6.3+nobinonly-0ubuntu4
 firefox-gnome-support 3.6.3+nobinonly-0ubuntu4
 firefox-branding 3.6.3+nobinonly-0ubuntu4
 abroswer N/A
 abrowser-branding N/A
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.ISO8859-15
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: firefox

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Thank you for reporting this to Ubuntu. Sometimes Firefox profiles can become corrupt and/or extensions can conflict. Could you please try this with a new profile and see if the problem still exists? You do not need to delete your old profile to test. If this helps, you might want to try to disable all your extensions and re-enable them one by one until you find the problematic one.

You can start the profile manager with the following command:
firefox -ProfileManager

[rsidd (rsidd)]

It happens with a fresh profile (though I think less severe), and the only add-on is Ubuntu Firefox Modifications 0.9rc2. However, it seems not very reproducible: it works fine for a few minutes, then becomes sluggish / freezes for a few seconds, then works again. I think the sluggishness is related to disk activity. To test that, I am doing a large "svn update" right now but it doesn't have a big effect. (Strigi has died down now.)

[Walter Garcia-Fontes (walter-garcia)]

This is happening to me too since I updated to lucid. I have some add-ons and haven't tried with a fresh profile or by taking out the add-ons. I attach the ouput of "ubuntu-bug --save dependecies.txt firefox" when firefox was frozen.

[rsidd (rsidd)]

This is no longer happening to me for the last day or so, with my usual profile. Firefox hasn't been updated, nor have any other relevant-looking packages. I can only guess that it was some bad interaction between firefox and strigi (which is now idle) -- but strigi didn't particularly stress out the system in other respects: it was perfectly responsive. If I have any further bad experiences I will update this bug.

[Abhijit Navale (abhi-navale)]

This happends with me. After I logout and logint then 'sometime's issue solves but not each time.
I am usbing Ubuntu Lucidy Lynx 10.04 64bit.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for firefox (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]