Comment 368 for bug 595047

Thomas: thanks for that update, and indeed the second and more reasonable testcase does not completely kill the system. I'm seeing a possibly interesting phenomenon: the testcase does not trigger any hang when run alone, but when Firefox is started, I can see swap usage rise, and then the mouse won't move for about a second from time to time.

So my guess is that when the system needs to swap, even for only a few MB, it's not able to do that smoothly for the user. Maybe there's a problem of scheduling when the kernel needs to choose to give priority to the swap or to the root partition. Or that's simply because writing to quite remote places on the disk leads to high latencies. Would that be worth a new bug? I think we're a few experiencing this problem here.

I generally agree that this bug is not leading anywhere, but ATST we don't even know how many different issues there are, so opening new reports is problematic too. Maybe we could concentrate on the few cases we're best able to describe precisely, and hope we all suffer from these...