169502 - browser hang when downloading large files

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core Graveyard :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[William Jon McCann]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020827
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20020918

Mozilla hangs when downloading large files.  There seems to be some relationship
between the size of the file that causes the hang and the disk cache size.

This only seems to occur when downloading files at relatively high speeds (>
1MByte/s).


Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create new profile
2. Visit URL
3. Download file
3. Repeat until hang occurs

Actual Results:  
The file download begins.  The download manager or progress dialog stops
updating.  Mozilla does not respond to any input and the window does not redraw.
 One mozilla-bin process consumes 99% of the CPU for about a minute.  After that
time it releases the CPU but the browser remains hung.  It it necessary to kill
the process.

Expected Results:  
Download the file to disk or invoke helper application.

HTTP pipelining is off.  There is plenty of space available in /tmp.  Cache is
set to compare every time.  Disk cache in this case was set to 50MB.

When I use the debug preference to disable both memory and disk cache this
problem occurs very rarely but it does still occur.

I have noticed this problem in all builds over the last few months.

Comment 1

[benc]

-> file handling

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

dupe of bug 171124 ?

Comment 3

[William Jon McCann]

This is still a problem in a trunk build 2002111912 on RedHat.  I was
downloading part of a Solaris 9 ISO image from
<http://survey.sun.com/servlet/viewsflash?cmd=showform&pollid=sol9_download>.
I had already downloaded two or three parts successfully and then then browser
hung up during one of the later ones.  I was downloading a few at a time but at
the time of the hang only one download was active.  Each of these downloads were
moving at ~500kps.

I tried to do a strace on the pid that "top" reported was using 99% of the CPU
but nothing was displayed.  I needed to kill the process.

Comment 4

[Philip Ross]

Build: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

I experienced the same sort of problem on Windows too when downloading Oracle
for Linux to disk from
http://otn.oracle.com/software/products/oracle8i/htdocs/linuxsoft.html
(linux81701.tar, 524 MB). An Oracle Technet login required to do the download.

The download proceeded at around 210 KB/s and then, once it had completed,
Mozilla locked up with a large amount of disk access for about 5 minutes.

There was no excessive CPU usage while Mozilla was locked up, just a lot of disk
access.

My disk cache size is set to 50 MB.

Comment 5

[Kenneth Herron]

Philip, the symptoms you describe may be mozilla's normal behavior. Mozilla
normally downloads files to a temporary location and then copies the file to its
real destination when the download is finished. With a very large file mozilla
might act as you describe during the copying process. I believe there's already
a bug filed about this kind of behavior.

Regarding the original report, see these similar reports: bug 165654, bug
166259, and bug 171124.

Comment 6

[Alexander Opitz]

Reporter can you reproduce this bug with a newer build (1.4 final)?
If not, then please close this bug as worksforme. Thanks.

Comment 7

[Jimmy Richards]

I also had this happen just now in Windows XP with Mozilla 1.5b(Mozilla/5.0
(Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030827), it hung. File was
a 710 MB file. My cache size setting in preferences is 100 MB's. 2003-08-29
Jimmy Richards

Comment 8

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

The original problem (99% CPU) hasn't been duplicated here in quite some time.

Jimmy Richards -- did you have a lot of CPU usage, or just a lot of disk activity?

I'm going to close this bug, assuming that the _original_ report is no longer a
problem. If you would like a dialog to pop up or you would like to be able to
interact with the browser as Mozilla does the copy-out-of-cache bit, you can
probably file a bug or enhancement request for it.

-M