669140 - cache.trash huge in size; causing huge startup times / freeze

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 670911

(Core :: Networking: Cache, defect)

Description

[spamadresse12345]

Attachment: ffbug.rar

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
Build ID: 20110615151330

Steps to reproduce:

I started Firefox from quickstart bar or w/e the bar in the lower left corner is called.
During that time, Windows update was running.
Before starting FF and doing Windows update I deinstalled SCSI marvel drivers.
On last Systemboot I installed SCSI marvel drivers which made my system freeze multiple times for ~5 seconds during last system start. Firefox was running during those freezes.

However, I have experienced those insane loadtimes with the exact same symptoms multiple times before without doing any changes to my hard/software, so I wouldn't count on those marvel driver caused freezes as the culprit at all, I just want to be precise.



Actual results:

After poping up, Firefox immidiatly went into some kind of "do nothing" state. I experience this issue about once a month, but this time I checked what could be the issue. The issue is a folder called cash.trash. It was about 1 gig in size and decreased with about ~5MB/second during that FF "freeze", but after reaching ~900MB it was gone and Firefox loaded as usual. 

The screenshot was taken during counting folder size, not at the end. It just took ages as my HDD was at 100% usage due to windows update and firefox cache issue.
I use 4 addons: Downthemall, Adblock plus, Ghostery, Download Statusbar


Expected results:

Firefox starts, loads all tabs.

Comment 1

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

Yep, Cache Invalidation and Rebuilding hurts I/O like nothing else when recovering Firefox from a non-normal Abortion :-/

Comment 2

[spamadresse12345]

Please read carefully. This has 100% nothing to do with eventuall "non-normal abortions". It was closed regularly, can't remember the last time firefox crashed.
No sessions had to be recovered therefore either. Never has, when this bug occured.

Comment 3

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

The Fact that you had a "cash.trash" Folder is a Prove alone that your Firefox suffered from a non-normal Abortion before. Firefox doesn't create that Folder by any Joke.

That does not happen necessarily only after a Crash accompanied by a Session Restore Tab appearing, ok?

Comment 4

[Jason Duell]

>  It was about 1 gig in size and decreased with about ~5MB/second during 
> that FF "freeze", but after reaching ~900MB it was gone and Firefox 
> loaded as usual. 

Michal/Bjarne:

Could this be regular cache eviction, due to hitting/exceeding max size (and/or maybe the user's free disk space decreased enough that we needed to shrink the cache--which we detect at restart, right?

spamadresse12345:  how much free disk space is there on the drive where your FF cache is?

Comment 5

[spamadresse12345]

I had at least 20 gig of free space there.

Comment 6

[spamadresse12345]

I can 100% rule out any disk space issues - I always have enough of that.
Also, it's winxp/sp3 and FF5.0 (it happened with 4.0 too!) if that's of any interest.
I am upgrading to win7 tomorrow and I give it a big chance that this won't ever happen again.

Thanks for your input, let's hope I am specially skilled in getting bugs like these and noone else encounters that.

Comment 7

[Bjarne (:bjarne)]

Are we sure this is *not* after a FF-crash? FF removes any trash-dir at startup, apparently on the calling thread. We could bump into the same issue as described in bug #630420, comment #5.

Comment 8

[spamadresse12345]

"Are we sure this is *not* after a FF-crash?" - yes. It definitly happens after regular firefox shutdowns. 

The OP of the thread you linked talks about 30 seconds start up time, it is more like 3-4 minutes in my case. 

I cleared my cache which was about 525MB in size prior to upgrading to win 7, so I guess if someone experiences this problem, it should be "fixable" by doing so.

Comment 10

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

This sounds similar to bug 730662.