337538 - Hanging "Save page" and "Save target" for many minutes then unhanging itself

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 240525

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[Peter]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3

Whenever(i.e. every instance) I try to "Save page", Firefox hangs but will often "unhang after 4-5 minutes,sometimes more. Same problem in right-click "Save Target as.." for most files including jpegs. 



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Download any web page
2.Right click on "Savepage as" or "Save Target as "
3.Wait. and wait, Usually several minutes.

Most of the time will eventually do what is required of it.

Actual Results:  
Whenever(i.e. every instance) I try to "Save page", Firefox hangs but will often "unhang after 4-5 minutes,sometimes more. Same problem in right-click "Save Target as.." for most files including jpegs. 

If I open the problem page in "Open this page with IE" option, the problems do not exist in IE., i.e. I am able to save the page or jpeg without a hang that moments before was hanging in Firefox. Though I loathe IE, I have had to resort to viewing page in Firefox, but saving it through IE.  

This problem only began with v1.5- the previous versions gave me no problem. I am still running(blush here) Win98 on a 266MHz PII with 128MB RAM...

I always make sure that Download Manager has a very short list of previous downloads,clearling it evrry 3 or 4 downloads of any sort, whether a few jpegs or a couple of pages. I've tried clearing cache etc. to no avail
Help, please, Peter

Expected Results:  
The browser hangs- but will often "wake up" after several minutes and will complete the task..

I hate to say this, but if it saved as it did on the Firefox versions previous to 1.5...

And as - and this is harder to admit to- IE6 saves the page or image with no fuss, no hangs...

I am aware that similar bugs have been reported, but I coudnt see one for my (ancient) platform, hence the submission.

Comment 1

[davidrogerhaumann]

(hope this is the right place to append  my experience too)
I have similar problem running under linux 1.5.0.3.  Diehard emacs user that I am, I constanly accidentally hit ctrl-s (Save Page As).  This brings up the dialog the first, second, and maybe third time before the browser hangs.  However, I have never witnessed firefox recover (I have left it running overnight).  I do this several times a day.  Ok, I'll reeeally try to stop
hitting ctrl-s...but sometimes I do want to save a page!

uname -a
Linux 2.6.12-1.1372_FC3p2smp #1 SMP Wed Jul 27 18:07:20 PDT 2005 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

ps -efl on the job yields:
0 S haumann   1632     1  0  77   0 - 11232 wait   Oct09 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.3/firefox -UILocale en-US
0 S haumann   1656  1632  0  78   0 - 11264 wait   Oct09 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.3/run-mozilla.sh /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.3/firefox-bin -UILocale en-US
0 S haumann   1661  1656  0  76   0 - 28552 stext  Oct09 ?        00:00:17 /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.3/firefox-bin -UILocale en-US

Comment 2

[Martin Stein]

I'm going to add a kindred bug to this. I've seen it at least since 2.0.

I'm also running FF on an old platform: ThinkPad with 600 MHz processor, 392 KB RAM, Windows 2000. Doubtless some of this is memory, but because it doesn't happen in any Windows programs (IE or Windows Explorer), it's a problem with Firefox. Here's a description....

I'm constantly getting very sluggish "save file as" windows -- this dates back at least to 2.0. The problem is strictly the fact that it's taking its sweet time reading and displaying icons and file names in the directory to which the file is going to be saved -- it's not sluggish with the popup of the "save file as" window per se. So, what's happening is that FF begins to take a full second to list each file name after another within a folder, and maybe a full two minutes, if you're trying to scroll through large folder subdirectories.

It DOES NOT happen when saving an Acrobat file from inside the browser (using Acrobat's disk icon to save the PDF). It does happen, however, when using FF's "save file as" command to save that same PDF.

Is it a problem just with saving per se? No. For instance, here's another case where it is happening. Using "Tools --> Options --> Main --> Downloads --> Save Files To" gives you the option of changing where the downloaded files are saved. But when I clicked the "Browse," button on that tab, FF was equally sluggish in reading and displaying the folder hierarchy then.

There are other reasons to think it isn't specific to the download manager. Example, this FF browser session I haven't downloaded anything since I started. The download manager is cleaned up. But the first "save as" command I tried was sluggish (so I aborted it, and saved nothing).

More likely this is a bug in how Firefox is reading the hierarchical file system that no other similar app encounters -- not Acrobat, not IE. This sort of sluggish file display never happens in Microsoft IE -- and even when I open a Windows Explorer window on the desktop while FF is open, the file hierarchy isn't sluggish to display in WE. Likewise, if I have a huge Word file open alongside FF, the save as function in Word displays instantly, while the FF save window is sluggish.

Probably also has to do with memory constraints. I've got a Word file that's using 28,000 KB and using 90% of the processor, while FF is taking up 90,000K and using 5% of the CPU. But even here, FF shouldn't be so interminably, unacceptably slow. 

Comment 3

[Charles Evans]

I have the same problem - 400mhz p2, 512m ram. 
uname -a
Linux Knoppix 2.6.19 #7 SMP PREEMPT Sun Dec 17 22:01:07 CET 2006 i686 GNU/Linux
iceweasel 2.0.0.1  
job is at 98 min cpu time
just changing the save dir WITHOUT opening the file list takes several minutes
IF the dir ( or a dir above it?) has more than 100-odd files
MUCH faster switching to a very small dir
konq changes to/saves to the same large dir almost instantly.
vmstat shows no swapping, no activity on dest ext3 partition for minutes at a time.
this resembles pathological garbage collection, 
but that seems very unlikely here.
extensions: tab mix plus, easygestures, adblock plus (set to off)

Comment 4

[Kevin Brosnan]

Try removing your downloads.rdf as described in http://kb.mozillazine.org/Unable_to_save_or_download_files if this fixes the issue it is a dupe of bug 159107.

Comment 5

[Charles Evans]

Yes, deleting my apparently empty downloads.rdf fixed the problem.
It also fixed the freeze on changing directory on file open dialog.
Thanks.

Comment 6

[Charles Evans]

correction: deleting downloads.rdf, uncheck remember what I've downloaded,
worked for several hours, then extreme slowness, then total lockup!
had to kill ffox, delete the 900 byte downloads.rdf, restart.
this is not good.