665050 - Slow script dialog problematic on slow-running (heavily-loaded) machine

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[(no longer active)]

Here's my scenario.  I have a Linux box which is not the fastest machine around.  I'm running a background task (xpcshell-tests if it matters, although I'm sure it doesn't) and I have Firefox running idle.  When I try to switch to it, I see ~10 slow script dialogs, some of them coming from chrome, others from content (I did even have one dialog coming from the js run on these dialogs itself!).

The reason that the scripts are slow in this case is because the system in general has slowed down to a crawl.  When this happens, these dialogs can only add frustration, because it takes a lot of time to close them all, and I often see more dialogs open up before I've managed to close all of the existing ones, which practically makes Firefox unusable until the background task has finished.

Can we be a bit smarter about when we should show these dialogs?

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Still an issue?
Are you getting 10 simultaneous Unresponsive Scripts?

Comment 2

[(no longer active)]

No, but if you read comment 0 carefully you will see that the bug here is the pure time based nature of our slow script dialog calculations which hasn't changed since I filed this bug.