207131 - Fb nightly 05/25 hangs (even more worse) for some seconds while rendering pages

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Volker]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030519 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030515 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

While Fb (current nightly as of 2003-05-25) is fetching and rendering pages,
there's a small amount of time (sometimes it's going to be up to 6 seconds) when
Fb hangs.

While fetching a single page it is hard to see but you'll notice the animated
(tab-) icon is hanging for a short time period. While the animated icon is
hanging, no mouse clicks or keyboard input is being processed (will be processed
when the page either completed rendering or will continue fetching). While Fb is
hanging you even can't switch to another open Fb window.

It's getting really worse if you fetch multiple pages at the same time as all
opened browser windows are hanging once in a while!
Nightly 2003-05-25 has been considered unuseable (for me) by that bug.

This behaviour has been noticed the first time using a nightly from mid of May
(03 and 04 nightlies didn't show that appearance) but the latest nightly
(2003-05-25) is doing it really bad and the delay (time while hanging) seems to
be extended (compared to mid May nightlies).

I've had to switch back to nightly 2003-05-19 which is at least useable with
that bug.

It _seems_ like pages without lots of graphics aren't causing _that much_
trouble but long pages or pages with lots of graphics appear to load with a
badly hanging browser for a few seconds.

tested using W2k SP1 US-EN, using squid 2.5-stable and wwwoffle at the LAN border.

Installed extensions: LiveHTTPHeader (disabled), NukeImage, Tabbrowser
Extensions (latest, 2003-05-20), TextLinks

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. open several tabs
2. load URI
3. while fetching, switch tabs or scroll on an already loaded page and you'll
notice a hanging browser until all pages are loaded and rendered

Comment 1

[Volker]

I've further checked the following, to make sure it's not an enviromental problem:

1) disabled all (left) extensions - no change
2) played around and changed proxy settings (squid@FreeBSD4.7) - no change
3) disabled use of proxy in Firebird - no change

To recreate the problem, open for example two tabs and load:
http://listings.ebaymotors.com/aw/plistings/list/category5347/index.html
http://listings.ebay.com/pool2/plistings/list/all/category7294/index.html?from=R4
(both pages contain lots of images)

Now reload both pages if you've not already noticed a slightly hanging browser.
In my case the browser window appeared to hang for 5-8 seconds. This should not
lead to problems but is driving you crazy when loading long pages in the
background and the foreground (focused) window or tab is hanging because of the
pages loading in the background.

Tested using two different clients (Win98SE and Win2k) so it should not be an
installation problem. The network is connected by a 64kbps link to the Internet.

Would please somebody else confirm this problem? I've worked for days to check
out the source of the problem with no result. Other browsers are working
properly even while connected through the proxy.

Comment 2

[Erik]

Volker, I can't confirm this using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US;
rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030601 Mozilla Firebird/0.6 but these bay be caused by our very
fast internet connection we have here @work.

You mentioned you disabled all extensions - but did you already tried creating a
_new_ profile by starting MozillaFirebird with option "-p"? And what about
SeaMonkey? Does SeaMonkey also shows this "hangs" on the pages you provided?

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

WFM using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b)
Gecko/20030601 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

Opened the two links given on top of the other four tabs I had open, the only
real delay was the loading of all of the images.  The other four tabs rendered
within a couple of seconds, the exception being the south african site I had
open, which opened in its normal timeframe.

Comment 4

[Volker]

hmm, I'm not really sure what's causing this trouble but after days of checking,
changing and testing again it smells like the proxy (either wwwoffle or squid)
or a slow machine (router) is causing these effects.
As in the moment I'm unable to completely tell if it's a Fb problem, I'm setting
this thread to WORKSFORME (even if I've really been unable to fix this).