209310 - hard drive churning and churning and churning when opening page

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 92580

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Jon Levin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401

Hello,

I have two systems that are upgraded to Redhat 9.0, one is a pentium III 500
with 128 Bytes of Mem and the other is a PIII 800 with 128 Bytes of mem. I have
had the same issue with both Mozilla 1.4b as well as on 1.4 rc1 and that is that
when working in mozilla the hard drive churns when doing simple tasks. I shut
down mozilla and there are still processes in ps auxw |grep mozilla. I kill -9
all processes and the churning stops.

I have also found that if I walk away from the systems and go back after a while
 and attempt to use mozilla it takes minutes again for some read-write activity
to finnish that appears to be related to the very moment that I click on the
mozilla window. I could do any other process without this activity.

I am now contemplating rolling back to Mozilla1.3 That is what I was running
before upgrading to Redhat 9.0 and subsequently mozilla1.4. 

I have looked at free and noticed that as would be expected all memory is being
sucked up. I have not done a strace on the process ids that mozilla is running
as. I can do that if it would be of assistance to you folks.

Let me know, I have always used this product and would like to see it not
stifling my work days. If there have been any findings of conflicts with
Redhat9.0, please let me know??

Thank you,

Jon

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.walk away from computer or leave mozilla running for a long time
2.attempt to use mozilla
3.sit and wait for the hard drive to stop itself from self destructing

Actual Results:  
I have to wait for up to five minutes for whatever processes that are happening
in mozilla after running for a long period of time to stop. no other processes
are using resources like mozilla. Mozilla uses approx 40% memory accordinig to
top when this is happening, however free shows all mem used and naturally swap
is then accessed.

Expected Results:  
opened, worked and caused no wait time!

I have had this happen on several occasions when I have been using mozilla and
attempt to go to another page and the drive starts going crazy. Again, I can go
to the term window just fine to do other tasks such as run top. It is slow due
to the drive access, however the other tasks work, mozilla doesn't until the
drive stops.

I have also had occasion that right clicking on a page in google.com will not
open a page, then when I left click on the page and let it open a new window
(the setting that I have selected in google.com) two windows appear. I can not
recreate this, it has happened only once. However it is just as strange as the
drive access issue mentioned above

Comment 1

[WD]

Symptoms of a machine with not enough RAM....
Is this a valid report?

Comment 2

[WD]

I'm going to invalidate this one.
RH9 recommended RAM is 192MB for "graphical mode"
http://www.redhat.com/software/linux/technical/

Since you have 128, your system is probably swapping before mozilla is even
running.  Running Mozilla (any ver) is going to make the problem worse, as it
has its own memory requirements too.

Comment 3

[Jon Levin]

I'm sorry, I mispoke the Pentium III 500 has 256 Megs of ram. The laptop 
has only 128.

Per Redhat's specs:
http://www.redhat.com/software/linux/technical/

*CPU:*
Minimum: Pentium-class
Recommended for Text Mode: 200 Megahertz Pentium-class or better
Recommended for Graphical Mode: 400 Megahertz Pentium-class or better

*Hard Disk Space*:*
Custom installation (minimum): 475 MB
Personal Desktop: 1.7 GB
Workstation: 2.1 GB
Custom installation (everything): 5.0 GB

*Additional space will be required for file storage.

*Memory Requirements:*
minimum for text mode: 64MB
minimum for graphical mode: 128 MB
recommended for graphical mode: 192 MB

The 128 is the minimum, this is starting to sound like a Microsoft type 
of issue. Since when does any Unice require such amounts of memory?

And if I shut down Mozilla the available memory opens up. Seems that 
Redhat is trying to take into account that there are some apps that are 
starting to suck up more then their share of mem requirements.

I wouldn't close this case, I would work on streamlining the product so 
that it is better then the others rather then status quo...


So, this machine has more then the recommended Memory as well as there is a problem


Let's look at free before shutting down mozilla:

[root@platypus grub]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        125992     123752       2240          0       4060      35620
-/+ buffers/cache:      84072      41920
Swap:       264592     236332      28260

Then after shutting it down:

[root@platypus grub]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        125992      89536      36456          0       2248      35728
-/+ buffers/cache:      51560      74432
Swap:       264592     212812      51780

Then restarted mozilla:
[root@platypus grub]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        125992     123452       2540          0       2396      46188
-/+ buffers/cache:      74868      51124
Swap:       264592     213400      51192


Jon

Comment 4

[WD]

That "free" command indicates a system with 128MB, which is not enough to run
KDE/Gnome + Mozilla well.

Anyway, duping to a footprint tracking bug.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 92580 ***