642351 - Firefox 4 B11/B12/RC hangs with 100% CPU on Mac OSX

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

During regular usage, Firefox 4 begins to respond slowly, then hangs and requires a force quit to exit.  Problem does not occur at any specific point.  Has happened when scrolling through a loaded page, when opening a new tab and when launching a link from an external program.

Restarting without Addins produces the same result.  I've tried B11, B12 and RC and all three have exhibited this behavior.  This problem is occurring at least once a day.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
Not possible to reproduce on demand.  Occurs after using the browser for a few hours (across multiple browsing sessions).
Actual Results:  
Firefox starts to respond to input slowly, then freezes.  CPU usage shows firefox process at 100%


Running Snow Leopard with the 64 bit kernel enabled

Comment 1

[Hubert Figuiere [:hub]]

I seen to have the exact same problem. It has been happening more and more frequently.

Comment 2

[Hubert Figuiere [:hub]]

Just happened again. Attaching the out of "sample". The process was using 168% of CPU and started to go awry after I click on the close box of a tab.

Comment 3

[Hubert Figuiere [:hub]]

Attachment: sample of firefox-bin on MacOS X 10.6.6 - x86_64

Comment 4

[Hubert Figuiere [:hub]]

One oustanding way to have the problem is to suspend and then wakeup the computer.

Comment 5

[Hubert Figuiere [:hub]]

I think I isolated the URL that is causing the problem. I can't reproduce if it is not open a tab.

http://www.overgaard.dk/leica-M9-digital-rangefinder-camera.html

Maybe we need an equivalent of "top", but for the Firefox tabs?

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

Attachment: Firefox sample output while hung w/100% CPU on OSX 10.6.7

Just woke computer up from sleep (opened lid).  Switched to Firefox and hit Command+T for new tab.  Began entering a URL and the hang occurred three characters in.  In this instance I was able to quit without a force quit, however the UI was otherwise completely unresponsive.

Comment 7

[kenny.macdermid]

Attachment: Firefox Sample 1 OSX 10.6.6

Seems to be happening every couple of days for me. Here's 1 of the samples.

Comment 8

[[e-mail]]

Attachment: Sample output while browser pane hung w/100% CPU - tabs still semi-responsive

Attaching another sample output.  This time Firefox allowed me to cycle tabs, but the browser pane was unresponsive to scrolling or clicking and I was unable to make changes in the URL bar.  CPU usage was 100% and I had to force quit to exit.  Uncompressed sample file is 23MB, so I was forced to gzip.

Comment 9

[mdavidson1]

Hi, I'm new to this bug reporting thing.  

This is happening to me, too.  I'm a regular user, upgraded when ffox 4 was released about 3 weeks ago.  

This problem first started happening maybe 5 days ago, happened about once per day.  Today it's happened 6-7 times - I can't figure out what's the trigger.  Sometimes I'll be scrolling through a page of loaded content, sometimes it's when I click a link.  

Since I started recording which page I'm on, I've noticed it happen in Google Finance, Google Reader, Wikipedia, and Reddit.  

When it hangs, it goes to 100% on both cores.  If I quit firefox, it usually goes down to 100% of one core, but doesn't actually quit.  I have to force-quit it.  Tabs become mostly unresponsive - if I close one, the tab still remains on the bar but I can't access the page.  

I'd like to help diagnose this problem, but I don't know how to find the sample output.  Please let me know what to do to help.  

Thanks

Comment 10

[mdavidson1]

Apologies for spamming this list... but it just happened again.  Over the course of about 30 seconds, memory usage increased by 100 MB.  After another 30 seconds or so, it changed from 100% of both cores to 100% of one core, and then about 30 seconds later, cpu usage went down to normal levels (10-15%) and memory dropped to the original baseline level.  

This time it happened while I was closing a tab.

Comment 11

[bobchew]

This has been happening all too often after updating to Firefox 4.0.1.

Firefox will hang seemingly by itself for no apparent reason, even when Firefox is left in the background while I do other stuff, including leaving the Mac alone. The hang can happen within minutes of starting Firefox, or sometimes after a couple of hours of use.

There are no obvious triggers to the hangs. Sometimes it happens when opening a tab, sometimes when a tab is closed (which will cause the tab being closed to remain in the tab bar, but no longer available). Other times, scrolling down a page will cause Firefox to hang. As mentioned earlier, Firefox will hang even when left alone.

During the hang, Firefox will consume 100% CPU on both cores for several minutes, then drop and use 100% of one core. A Force-Quit is the only way to kill the process.

Using Expose and Spaces seem to excarbate the problem. But since the hang does not happen every time I change Space, I can't confirm it. In Console.app, "windowserver.log" lists a lot of errors "kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXSetTrackingAreaEnabled : Invalid tracking area" when Firefox hangs, this may be related.

Moreover there are no other mesages that are logged in Console.app (or at least not visible there).

Is there a build of Firefox that has more verbose logging to help in pinpointing the cause of these hangs?

Comment 12

[Swarnava Sengupta (:Swarnava)]

cant reproduce on Firefox 11, 12b5,13 and 14

for support please ask question in https://support.mozilla.org/questions/new