1378769 - Open file dialog freezes on frequent filesystem change

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Widget: Gtk, defect, P5)

Description

[weiss]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0
Build ID: 20170629155837

Steps to reproduce:

Go to /tmp and run

while true; do touch freeze; done

Then, in Firefox, navigate the File Open dialog to /tmp.



Actual results:

Firefox freezes because the directory refresh events flood its event queue and it constantly redraws the dialog (I believe).  Becomes totally unresponsive.


Expected results:

There should probably be a timeout in the dialog that only allows a refresh every so often, possibly dependent on the directory size because this will affect how long it takes.

Note that this is not a made-up scenario.  GCC constantly creates temporary files in /tmp, and while compiling I had several freezes with Firefox that could only be resolved by killing either the make process or Firefox.

Also note that the exact same behavior is present in Thunderbird.

Comment 1

[makosoft]

I think this may have regressed further sometime around Firefox 64.0? It seems to keep the file dialog around and responding to filesystem events even after it's been closed, meaning that frequent filesystem changes in any directory that a file dialog has previously been used in during that session make the Firefox UI completely unresponsive until they stop even if no file dialog is currently open.

Comment 2

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1552613