198061 - downloading / saving to floppy causes unresponsive UI

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[Olivier]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312

Writing files to a floppy from mozilla seems to freeze the UI. I've tried:
1) downloading a file from a fast server and saving it to floppy (partial freeze
with a few moments of responsiveness)
2) saving a local web page to a floppy (total freeze)

Unfortunately I don't have access to any other slow storage (zip, network
shares) to see if this is floppy-specific or happens anytime the data comes in
faster than it can be written.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a local html file (or complete web page).
2. Choose File/Save Page As and select a floppy drive with a floppy in it as the
target.


Actual Results:  
UI froze until the operation completed.

With large enough files I even got the "this application is not responding"
dialog from windows. This happens regardless of wether or not the download
manager is used (preferences:navigator/downloads).

Expected Results:  
UI should stay responsive.

Comment 1

[Jon Henry]

-> Networking: File

Olivier, are you able to reproduce this behavior in a recent build? The one you
originally used to file this bug is now out of date, and this bug may have been
fixed. Your bug report is great, I just don't have a floppy drive in this
machine to test with.

Comment 2

[Jon Henry]

Actually -> Networking: File. Sorry for the bugspam.

Comment 3

[Olivier]

I just tested today's nightly build on both linux and Windows. The problem is
still present on Windows. Saving http://www.tomshardware.com/ (300KB and 40
files) to a floppy takes about 1m30 during which the UI only refreshes 2 or 3
times. The rest of the time mozilla is shown as "not responding" in the task
manager. It briefly flashes to "running" when the UI refreshes. It seems as if
it will go through its message loop a few times during the save but not nearly
often enough.

I had not tried it previously but Linux seems unaffected. This might be because
floppy writes are instantaneous; the kernel seems to buffer them entirely on my
system. I'll see if I can disable that feature and reproduce the problem on linux.

Comment 4

[OstGote!]

Could this be a dupe of bug 103766? The problems described there occur if you
have a slow disk/network drive/large file and a floppy is very slow.

Comment 5

[Guillermo Marraco]

Saving web pages to disk make all the firefox windows freeze until the save is
ended.

Very annoying because I try to save time connection (is costly) saving all the
pages and readint it offline.

becase this i can use only one firefox window, and many MS IExplorer windows.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

unbuffered floppy writes are terminally slow.  But the effects do not meet the definition of critical+hang, so removing.