296092 - Saving directly to a busy network share makes FF unresponsive

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[firefox-bugzilla]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

When saving to a busy Samba share, FireFox becomes unresponsive, hangs (but does
not crash), and generally misbehaves.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a Samba share on your favourite flavour of Linux (mine is Debian).
2. Remember that your desktop has a 100mbit card in, and your Linux server has a
10mbit card in.
3. Set up a number of large files transferring to your newly-created Samba share
simultaneously.
4. Instruct FireFox to save a file to the same share and server.
5. Sit back and wait. Do not attempt to use the FireFox process, as it will not
respond.
Actual Results:  
FireFox grinds to a halt.

Expected Results:  
FireFox, as I understand, writes to the network share directly (same behaviour
as a floppy disk I presume?) as opposed to IE downloading it to cache and then
copying it to the "Save To..." location.

Comment 1

[OstGote!]

related is Bug 198061 and Bug 265446

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 3

[firefox-bugzilla]

Also happens with "busy" removable media, such as a USB flash drive / memory
card that is already being written to / read from.

Comment 4

[Steven Wagner]

I can confirm this. Saving a download directly to a network share causes a obvious slow down to firefox. General unresponsiveness and "strobe" effect, where I can be typing into a form on a website and i can see each keystroke print on the screen individually about 1 per second. I am on Windows XP SP2 w/ Firefox 1.5.0.4.

Comment 5

[soloturn]

i can confirm it also. generally download manager seems to be single threaded with the browser. also saving to local disk makes ff unresponsive.

Comment 6

[Adi]

I can also confirm this. I've had this problem ever since I started using firefox  on windows (at least a year I'm guessing) and it's exasperating: if the network share does not respond all of the FF windows hangs.

Please don't curse me if making programming suggestions on a bugzilla page is innapropiate (there doesn't seem to be any etiquette page) and, also, I have no idea how to write code for firefox or if this is valid within the ff model, but when I would write code, if I was faced with a problem  like this I would have started a thread togheter with the main process that would take over from whenever a download started: that being the selecting of directory. This way if the thread did not respond to what i'm guessing is a directory listing, the whole of the process would not hang.

Comment 7

[William Bumgarner [:zsinj]]

changing version per comment 4. Comfirming per all 2006 comments.

Comment 8

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

In the process of migrating remaining bugs to the new severity system, the severity for this bug cannot be automatically determined. Please retriage this bug using the new severity system.

Comment 9

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:mak, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 10

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Downloading should now happen in a background task, thus it should not block the UI thread normally.
If you can still reproduce please file a new bug and attach a performance profile