plugin-container uses 100% of CPU and does not release the resources after tabs are closed

[Jeff Lane ]

Binary package hint: firefox

I've noticed that the latest version of Firefox tends to have this issue.

After opening a few tabs with various sites (I believe the most common culprit here are sites that use some sort of Flash), I notice that plugin-container is using 100% of at least one CPU, and sometimes it's driving load on more than one core.

For example, here's the info from top:

top - 17:44:31 up 5 days, 5:14, 6 users, load average: 3.36, 3.54, 3.52
Tasks: 316 total, 2 running, 313 sleeping, 1 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu0 : 23.8%us, 11.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 61.0%id, 1.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 2.2%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 54.4%us, 5.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 39.6%id, 0.9%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu2 :100.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu3 : 19.9%us, 2.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 72.2%id, 5.4%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu4 : 19.6%us, 14.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 66.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu5 : 38.2%us, 7.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 52.0%id, 2.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu6 : 0.0%us, 3.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 88.9%id, 8.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu7 : 4.2%us, 0.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 89.7%id, 5.4%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 3914416k total, 3151832k used, 762584k free, 687044k buffers
Swap: 10675156k total, 114144k used, 10561012k free, 576012k cached

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
24178 bladernr 20 0 702m 55m 23m S 102 1.4 203:10.26 plugin-containe
 7121 bladernr 20 0 146m 66m 780 R 93 1.7 682:51.00 rsync
 1429 root 20 0 333m 201m 14m S 23 5.3 873:10.61 Xorg
 7123 bladernr 20 0 146m 4588 324 S 20 0.1 134:09.67 rsync
25211 bladernr 20 0 995m 267m 32m S 17 7.0 18:22.50 firefox-bin

I have two intensive activities going on here... one is an rsync backing up a portable hard disk, the other, is plugin-container, launched by Firefox.

I've seen this behaviour before, without running rsync or any apps other than firefox.

After a while, plugin-container just pegs one or more cores on my CPU, and remains that way even AFTER closing all but one tab. The only way I have found to release these resources, and ease the load on my CPUs is to kill off Firefox. Plugin-container just seems to get stuck.

This also affects video streaming playback as the high CPU usage causes streamed video to stutter.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: firefox 3.6.12+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.10.10.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-22.35-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-22-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Nov 26 17:40:19 2010
FirefoxPackages:
 firefox 3.6.12+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.10.10.1
 firefox-gnome-support 3.6.12+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.10.10.1
 firefox-branding 3.6.12+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.10.10.1
 abroswer N/A
 abrowser-branding N/A
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: firefox

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

For now, here's a tarball of the /proc directory for the PID of plugin-container, maybe it will have some useful info...

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

bladernr@klaatu:~$ ps axf |grep plugin
31478 pts/3 S+ 0:00 \_ grep --color=auto plugin
24178 ? Sl 208:30 /usr/lib/firefox-3.6.12/plugin-container /home/bladernr/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so 26605 plugin true
bladernr@klaatu:~$

Oddly enough, this time even killing off Firefox did not kill plugin-container and release the processor.

I had to manually kill the plugin-container instance which was choked on libflashplayer.so (as shown above) in order to finally ease the burden on my CPU.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Could you please attach GDB to plugin-container when it does this? I guess it will just show that it's spinning somewhere inside the Flash plugin, in which case, there's not much we can do other than show it to Adobe

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Fabien Chéreau (xalioth)]

I can reproduce this problem and I have some more precisions:
 - This seem to happens only when using a flash NetStream object AND from the point a microphone source (using the attachAudio method) is attached to it, AND only if the microphone is muted in the sound preferences.

Once the problem started, trying to detach the audio source using attachAudio(null) doesn't stop the problem. Furthermore, it seems that appart from the high CPU load, the disk is also used intensively, maybe used by buffers or something like that.

I have found this bug when working on the website that I am currently developing (www.chatocracy.com/webcam-chat) and where the bug can be repeated each time a video call is initiated.

I use ubuntu 10.10 with firefox and flash 10.2.152.27

Fabien

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

Maverick is dead. Closing bug properly.