Comment 1 for bug 496839

Am I totally alone with this problem?

I have a little more information. xulrunner-1.9.1 is a dependency of firefox 3.5.x, so it is possible to avoid the problem by simply never upgrading past firefox 3.0.x

Finally I've gone back to Jaunty (there are just too many issues with my setup and karmic to even consider an upgrade again) and I have avoided firefox 3.5 since reinstallation. During a previous reinstallation however, I noticed exactly the same problem as I had in Karmic: xulrunner-1.9.1 will never finish installing (it left it running all day...)

Furthermore, the process is always in sleep or wait status, giving me the impression that it's hoping for some kind of trigger to go off but it never comes.

I still have no log information regarding the issue, but I found an interesting tidbit on phoronix just now:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ext4_btrfs_nilfs2&num=2

It seems ext4 is quite slow with sql databases. My system is installed on an ext4 formatted RAID:0.

Could this be the route of the problem?