250305 - Firefox will hang with heavy CPU utilization on (incomplete?) web pages

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[4trakrec]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040626 Firefox/0.9.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040626 Firefox/0.9.1

When you attempt to load at least the above "friends" page, Firefox will
occasionally hang and crash; the CPU utilization goes to 100% (or 50% on my
hyperthreaded-Pentium, which I'm not sure if it has anything to do with it. I've
tried using only one CPU and it doesn't seem to help much.) 

Livejournal Friends pages may be a good test for engineers at this time;
especially between 10PM-1AM EST they tend to be slammed and often seem to break
up as incomplete. It seems like this sometimes freaks Firefox out for some
reason. I can't get this to happen consistently, but I can get it to happen
sometimes. My postulate is that incomplete images, or HTML pages (that abort
before they load), may cause Firefox to crash on occasion.

I have found that the application seems to hang a *little* less when you switch
the application to Windows 2000 compatibility mode; it doesn't seem to help much
on the web page end, but seems to allow for more incomplete images to pop up.

I have found no other page that Firefox hangs on at this time.

Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load the web page during a high traffic time. Tonight I've found that it will
crash about 1 out of every 4 or 5 times loaded.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
One out of four to five times, the application will hang and CPU utilization
will go to 100% (well, 50% in my hyperthreading PC)

Expected Results:  
Not hang. :)

No themes loaded, but an extensive array of extensions. I have not tried
creating a new profile yet with no extensions to test the results.

Comment 1

[Adam Hauner]

4trakrec: Could you provide TalkBack incident ID?

Comment 2

[4trakrec]

(In reply to comment #1)
> 4trakrec: Could you provide TalkBack incident ID?

The program unfortunately never *crashes*; it merely hangs... this means that
Talkback is never launched. To exit the program, a Ctrl-Alt-Delete followed by
ending the task is needed. 

If you know a way to launch Talkback manually, that I can utilize so I can send
you an error report... let me know. Thanks.

Comment 3

[Adam Hauner]

If Firefox doesn't crash, TalkBack doesn't help.

Comment 4

[Troy Whittington]

I just want to comfirm that i am too having the same problems with fire fox 9.x 

im using windows 2000 sp4 ati radeon catalys driver 4.6 512 m of ram 

pages that i have seem this happen on is as follows

www.slashdot.org
www.warp2search.net
www.starwarsgaxies.com
www.bluesnews.com


i do not beleive it to be a particular web page ...  as this lock up is random 

and as stated the cpu utilization goes to 99% and the machine is just about
unuseable untill you end task it from the task manager .

only thing installed is the macromedia flash plugin 
this may be the culprit but im unsure 

Comment 5

[4trakrec]

Interesting, thanks. The one thing in common that we both have is the ATI Radeon
video card. I wonder if something in the video driver is not liking something
that Firefox is doing. 

I do not have the Flash plugin installed on Firefox and am using Windows XP. I
have 2GB of RAM.

I do have a P4 with hyperthreading, I know that has caused problems with some
apps in the past... maybe that's a factor?

Comment 6

[Philip Rinn]

No problems for me with Win XP SP2, ATI Mobility Radeon 9200, Omega 2.5.67
driver (patched ATI driver) and no hyperthreading P4 (it's a Pentium M 1,6 GHz)
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913
Firefox/0.10

Comment 7

[u88484]

WFM Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040923
Firefox/0.10 

Xp SP2, ATI 9800PPRO, Athlon Xp 2100+

Comment 8

[assaultdk]

Im using Firefox 1.04 and the same happens.

Comment 9

[Ryuichi KUBUKI]

WFM on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050913
Firefox/1.6a1