479436 - Firefox stops responding to mouse interaction when running multiple windows with flash content under high cpu load

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Jonatan Wallgren]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011912 Firefox/3.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6

When running many windows with cpu demanding flash content firefox stops responding to mouse interaction. No mouse interaction works including switching focus, scrolling or really doing anything like closing a window. To the user the applications seems to crash but that's not really the case. Firefox still runs the flash content but you cant control the browser with the mouse. The bug has been observed with multiple flash players including 10,0,12,36 but almost all versions of flashplayer 9 and 10 has been tested and exhibit the same behaviour. The bug only occur on the windows version of firefox it has not been reproduced on mac and linux(ubuntu). But it has also been shown to occur in both 3.0.4 and 3.0.6 on windows.

This bug does not occur in any other browser we tested which includes

1, IE all versions (different flashplayer activex)
2, Opera (Same flashplayer as firefox - plugin)
3, k-meleon (Same flash player as firefox and asfaik the same rendering engine as firefox -gecko)

The problem is more severe on low end system but has been demonstrated on high systems as well. There doesn't seem to be a linear relationship with the bug occurring and system specs though.

I am going to mark this bug as critical because even if its not a true crash a user perceives it as such and in certain cases also the OS also seem to stop responding to mouse so the user does hard resets to overcome the problem. Curiously enough you can alt-tab between windows.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Go to http://zoltanb.co.uk/extras/ptest/launch.html
2.When you click on any of the links you will launch a window
3.On some machines the bug occur after launching a few windows, on some machines you have to launch many
Actual Results:  
Firefox stops responding to mouse interaction

Expected Results:  
Firefox should respond to mouse interaction

Comment 1

[Jonatan Wallgren]

The bug is more easily reproduced when you drag a window after you launch it.

Comment 2

[Luis Lobo Borobia]

The same happens here with Firefox 3.6b3

Comment 3

[Luis Lobo Borobia]

BTW, platform is Windows 7

Comment 4

[Luis Lobo Borobia]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; es-AR; rv:1.9.2b3) Gecko/20091115 Firefox/3.6b3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Comment 5

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Confirmed with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101028 Firefox/4.0b8pre

After opening two pop-ups the browser nearly hangs completely. Why do the Flash processes influence the Firefox process that much, even they are out-of-process?

Comment 7

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

Jim, can you look? Sounds like this might not be windows specific though, so cc:ing some more people.

Comment 8

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This bug was filed on mac not-OOPP and has morphed several times since then. We should probably retest this on all three platforms after async plugins is available. Until then, I'm not sure the data will be very meaningful.

Comment 9

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Hmm, 10 popups, all visible. No problem with the ui in the main window that launched the popups.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101031 Firefox/4.0b8pre

Comment 10

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

ipc disabled is also ok. I'll try testing on mac as well.

Comment 11

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Tested on mac and also went back and tested the latest 3.6 releases on windows. I'm not seeing this, so I'm going to close it out WFM. If someone can reproduce (I'm usually opening about 6 windows and then rolling the mouse over the favorites bar on the main window looking for slowness) please reopen.

[Note the original poster listed windows as the platform, 3.0 as the release.]

Comment 12

[Jonatan Wallgren]

Hi

The bug was reported quite a long time ago and I cant reproduce it now either. Worth to note is that the bug occurred when the flash player took 100% or very close to 100% of the processing power. I cant really see that happening now. It seems like the latest flash players, my guess would after 10.1 release, stops animation if to much cpu resources are being used. This seems to prevent the bug from occurring. If I have time I can check the bug with an older flash player as well.

Comment 13

[jiangiang91]

Hi
I'm using the latest junk minfield 4pre8(11/7/2010),and after i opened a flash game(facebook game like mafia, treasure island), it still very laggy(the picture in games seem like hard to come out)and the mouse is hard to click anything on the minefield(another tab, menu bar etc),and with the same platform, using google chorme, it is very smooth to load anything in flash and no problem on switching tab or clicking anything on google chorme.
I tested it on two enviroment:
AMD ahtlon 64x2 with nvidia 8600GT graphic card
Intel Atom N450 with pine trail graphic.
Adobe flash square

Comment 14

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

It's definitely not WFM. As the last comment expressed Farmville is a perfect test case for an issue like that. Once you stay in an higher level, the complete browser feels completely sluggish and reacts very slowly on UI interactions. On my MBP the scrolling or tab change takes longer than 1s.

Tested with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101106 Firefox/4.0b8pre ID:20101106030745

Comment 15

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

(In reply to comment #14)
> It's definitely not WFM. As the last comment expressed Farmville is a perfect
> test case for an issue like that. Once you stay in an higher level, the
> complete browser feels completely sluggish and reacts very slowly on UI
> interactions. On my MBP the scrolling or tab change takes longer than 1s.
> 
> Tested with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b8pre)
> Gecko/20101106 Firefox/4.0b8pre ID:20101106030745

This could be any number of the existing bugs we have on flash performance. A number of which relate to the layers/acceleration work we've done. But farmville doesn't really apply to this bug IMHO, since this bug was about multiple windowed flash popups slowing down the main ui.

Comment 16

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

closing again based on comment 12 by original poster.

Comment 17

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Ok, I have run the testcase from comment 0 and I can see the slow reaction when scrolling and switching tabs. When you have a couple of those popups open the Flash content even stops playing and only starts when the context menu is open. In such a situation it doesn't stop completely for mouse interactions but makes it really sluggish.

Comment 18

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Oh and the installed Flash version is:

    File: Flash Player.plugin
    Version: 10.1.85.3
    Shockwave Flash 10.1 r85