722614 - Youtube videos stutter strongly and cause occasional system freezes

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[banjo2E]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1
Build ID: 20111220165912

Steps to reproduce:

This has been happening whenever I go to Youtube. I haven't used many other Flash video players, but I believe it's happened to them too. Furthermore, and most cryptically, I've been getting this problem on Youtube's HTML5 videos as well, though the latter format has not, to date and to the best of my knowledge, caused my system to freeze.


Actual results:

When playing a video, I will frequently experience a sort of stuttering in which the video freezes but the audio plays just fine. This normally lasts for at most a second or two but happens constantly.

However, on occasion, generally when the video has just started, freeze not only the video, but the controls as well. The audio keeps playing normally, but at this point my system becomes unresponsive as follows: Initially just the video is frozen, but Firefox quickly hangs. After this I am still able to interact with the taskbar for at most half a minute; by interact, I mean I can highlight the buttons for different windows/programs, and right-clicking gives me the context menu as normal, though telling Firefox to close this way accomplishes nothing. Eventually the taskbar freezes as well, leaving me with only the ability to move my mouse, but shortly after the taskbar freezes so does my mouse cursor. At this point I have to force a hard shutdown on my system.


Expected results:

I first noticed this issue this past December; before that, videos on Youtube and elsewhere always played normally.

I suspect this bug and bug 697739 are strongly related if not identical, since the one time I managed to open Task Manager to see what was eating my CPU it turned out to be plugin-container.EXE, and forcing the process to end immediately gave me a watchdog.sys BSOD.

Comment 1

[banjo2E]

Since I'm not seeing this anywhere else on this form, I reported this with the link on bp-2e12e0c5-9ce2-402b-8720-f85562120131

Comment 2

[Scoobidiver (away)]

Uninstall fully the Ask Toolbar, using for instance the following removal tool:
http://general-changelog-team.fr/outils/289-adwcleaner#englishadwcleaner

Comment 3

[banjo2E]

I've never used that software, and I run Malwarebytes once a week and it hasn't noticed anything wrong with Firefox, but I'll run that tool anyway.

Comment 4

[banjo2E]

Oh, wow. Okay, I could NOT use that removal tool. It decided to eat up 100% of my CPU during its scan, which took upwards of five minutes, and this massive burn of resources was required in order to...give me a list of registry keys and a few entries in Firefox's addons thing for some sort of search thing I don't have installed? I was a bit surprised anything was detected, so I told it to go ahead and delete...at which point it told me to close all running programs, and after that decided to hit 100% CPU for another five minutes without doing anything, at which point I killed it with task manager. Using task manager I found out that apparently this program had decided to forcibly kill several of my background processes, instead of just programs that were actually related to things it had detected. Based on this, I assume the thing ran headlong into my firewall and antivirus processes, and just kept trying to brute force them down whilst my security software did its job and refused to stop running.

Basically, it seems to be a horribly designed piece of code without any sanity checks whatsoever, and I'd appreciate it if someone gave me something to use that didn't try to melt my motherboard performing a simple file search.

Comment 5

[Scoobidiver (away)]

Do you have Updater.exe in your task manager when the hang happen?

Comment 6

[banjo2E]

Closest thing I have to that is UpdateCenterService.exe, which apparently belongs to NVIDIA, which is where my graphics card drivers are from. I'll try this again with that process disabled just in case.

Comment 7

[banjo2E]

Well, it ran successfully, though it still ate my CPU for over a minute in scanning and deleting, and it forced a reboot on me on the removal section.

Here's the portion of the log file pertaining to Firefox, the other sections were empty. Apparently the registry key stuff was resolved in the middle of the session I killed with Task Manager, or something.

-\\ Mozilla Firefox v10.0 (en-US)

Profile : 7ebzeq0l.default
File : C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\7ebzeq0l.default\prefs.js

Deleted : user_pref("capability.policy.maonoscript.sites", "110mb.com 2012supplies.com 2kgames.com 413chan.net[...]
Deleted : user_pref("extensions.foxlingo.addit.defaultAddons", "{ \"software\": {\"7\": {\"id\": \"7\",\"title[...]
Deleted : user_pref("[e-mail]-event-fired", true);
Deleted : user_pref("extensions.tweakmdb.addit.remoteInstallItems", "{ \"software\": {\"63\": {\"id\": \"63\",[...]
Deleted : user_pref("extensions.veohsearchrecs.SupportedSites", "<?xml version=\"1.0\" ?>\r\n<results revision[...]
Deleted : user_pref("extensions.veohsearchrecs.VeohVersion", "1.5.1");
Deleted : user_pref("extensions.veohsearchrecs.id", "d2508cc9a-bb22-c071-137a-9dcd02e599c");
Deleted : user_pref("extensions.veohsearchrecs.lastsitedate", "20");
Deleted : user_pref("extensions.veohsearchrecs.veohenabled", "false");
Deleted : user_pref("extensions.veohsearchrecs.veohfamilyfilteron", "false");
Deleted : user_pref("playsushi.position.button", true);
Deleted : user_pref("surfcanyon.added_to_searchbar", true);
Deleted : user_pref("surfcanyon.daily_code", "scIsOnSearchEngineDomain = function() {\nreturn contains(scCurre[...]
Deleted : user_pref("surfcanyon.daily_code_timestamp", "1301275597171");
Deleted : user_pref("surfcanyon.hourly_code", "scGetDocument = function() {\nreturn scIsFF ? content.document [...]
Deleted : user_pref("surfcanyon.hourly_code2", "scEnableGoogle_hourly = function() {\nvar args = window.locati[...]
Deleted : user_pref("surfcanyon.hourly_code_timestamp", "1301283707955");
Deleted : user_pref("surfcanyon.inst_id", "58578350006512535754280112444419");
Deleted : user_pref("surfcanyon.inst_timestamp", "1297304662241");
Deleted : user_pref("surfcanyon.last_seen_splash", "320");
Deleted : user_pref("surfcanyon.num_searches", "1");
Deleted : user_pref("surfcanyon.partner_code", "AFA");
Deleted : user_pref("tweaktube.pref.cacheInfo", "({'hxxp://wedata.net/databases/AutoPagerize/items.json':{url:[...]

Comment 8

[banjo2E]

OH JESUS CHRIST THAT PIECE OF S*** DELETED MY NOSCRIPT SETTINGS.

Please, for the love of god, never recommend it to anyone else ever again. EVER.

Comment 9

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

banjo2E, this bug is pretty old at this point and it looks like it was a malware issue. Do you have any objection to closing out this bug?  Are you still having stuttering issues with Flash when you use this graphics card?

Comment 10

[banjo2E]

I don't have access to the system that had the stuttering anymore, my CPU started to die about 12 months after my previous comment on this bug. To be honest, I'd forgotten about this bug entirely. I can say that until the system became unusable, the bug was consistently present, and I'd run periodic antivirus/malware checks on it with up-to-date software without detecting anything; but since I no longer have access to the system in question I can't be of any help in diagnosing this anymore. My current system uses a completely different set of parts and OS, runs a different fork of Firefox, and doesn't experience this bug.