473056 - Slow Browsing if Hard Drive in Heavy Use, beach ball on Mac

Status: VERIFIED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Daniel E.]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090108 Minefield/3.2a1pre Ubiquity/0.1.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090108 Minefield/3.2a1pre Ubiquity/0.1.4

Browsing with Mozilla Firefox in the unstable version I use becomes very slow if the hard drive is in heavy use, e.g. because Time Capsule is running. Scrolling and text input are in particular affected by the described slow-down.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start browsing with Firefox, do some text input and scrolling;
2. Wait for heavy use of the hard drive (or start Time Capsule, for example);
3. Continue browsing with Firefox, do some more text input and scrolling.
Actual Results:  
Noticable slow-down, in particular with regard to scrolling and text input.

Expected Results:  
No slow-down (the same heavy disk-usage doesn't affect Opera and Safari).

The problem is not site-specific. This Buzilla site is affected too, e.g. filling in form fields such as the one I'm currently filling in becomes a pain.

Comment 1

[Daniel E.]

In Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090228 Minefield/3.2a1pre Ubiquity/0.1.4, the problem is still reproducible.

Comment 2

[Simon Howes]

This is still a problem for me. It has ‘bugged’ me for quite some time. Spotlight was just indexing on my machine, and UI bach-balls when you click on anything, web pages take a awful long time to open. Safari on the other hand performs fine.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Daniel, do you see this when using v3.5?

Comment 4

[Simon Howes]

Apologies for hijacking the question pointed to Daniel. I have seen this problem since 3.0 to current 3.7a1pre.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Simon in comment #4
> Apologies for hijacking the question pointed to Daniel. I have seen this
> problem since 3.0 to current 3.7a1pre.

so even with few tabs?
many bookmarks?

Comment 6

[Simon Howes]

One tab on a clean profile, the browsers performance is degraded some what.

Comment 7

[Michael Wu [:mwu]]

This is likely to be related to the disk cache. Turning off the diskcache (browser.cache.disk.enable -> false) should help things. Bug 513008 should improve things but I've heard that minefield is still having this issue.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Simon, daniel, is you issue resolved in trunk build with Bug 513008?

Comment 9

[Simon Howes]

Wayne,

Just decided to test — just running "du -a" in terminal seems to thrash the hard drive enough. UI still feels slightly laggy, but no longer beach-balls, however some web sites cause the who UI to beach-ball for 20-30 seconds when a web site is loaded for the first time, http://arstechnica.com/ being an example. 

There has been a positive improvement to response while hard drives are busy in recent weeks. :)

Comment 10

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Simon, do you still see this with Firefox 4?

Comment 11

[Simon Howes]

Yes, UI, loading web pages etc is still very laggy when the hard drive is in use. 

I have tried running "du -a" again, and the app beach balls when you try to load a web page, open a menu item etc.

Comment 12

[Alfredos-Panagiotis Damkalis [:fredy]]

Simon do you still experience this bug?

If yes could you test again at safe mode (http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode) or with a new profile (http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles).

Comment 13

[Simon Howes]

Yes, it is still a problem. Spotlight was reindexing the othe day and I had to use Chrome as Firefox was unusable.

Comment 14

[u279076]

Is there a way to manually trigger Spotlight re-indexing? Do you have a platter-based hard driver or an SSD?

Comment 15

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Anthony Hughes, Mozilla QA (:ashughes) from comment #14)
> Is there a way to manually trigger Spotlight re-indexing? Do you have a
> platter-based hard driver or an SSD?

I would add, what IO is firefox doing, such that heavy external IO is having such bad impact?

Comment 16

[Mihai Morar, (:MihaiMorar)]

Not able to reproduce this on Latest Nightly (2013-01-27) and FF 19b3 on Mac OS 10.8.2 following STR from Comment 0

Comment 17

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks MarioMi

It seems pretty clear now that David E. is not going to reply.
so => incomplete

Comment 18

[u279076]

Also dropping qawanted. Daniel, feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the necessary info so we can move forward on this bug.

Thank you.