firefox is regularly dying

[Christopher Beland]

On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 13:49 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Apr 2009, Christopher Beland wrote:
> 
> > I often see Flash-using pages suck up a lot of CPU.  I have the
> > Flashkiller Firefox plugin installed, which might be helpful to
> > isolate the cause.  Though usually there is a separate process also
> > using a lot of CPU (but maybe not at the top of the list).
> > Sometime other animations (like animated GIFs or Java) can also use
> > a lot of CPU.
> 
>   a couple observations.  i deleted the flash plugin from
> /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, but that didn't solve the problem.

I'm not sure this is a recommended uninstall method, and usually plugin
install/uninstall requires a browser restart to take effect.  You can
check to see what the browser is actually using by choosing from the
Firefox menu "Tools -> Add Ons" and poking through the various tabs
there.  There you can be sure you've disabled Flash and Java and
anything else you might have installed.  You can disable image loading
from "Edit -> Preferences -> Content" to see if that solves the problem.

Are there any specific URLs where if that's the only web page you load,
you get unwanted CPU usage?  I can help diagnose the problem.

>   more amusingly, i've found a site that has invariably locked up
> firefox the last four times in a row i've gone there:
> 
>   http://linux-kvm.org
> 
> when i browse over there, the page starts loading, it displays but the
> progress bar shows that only about 90% has been loaded, at which point
> i get an I-beam cursor that i can move around, but nothing else works
> -- no virtual console, no switching virtual desktop, no Zapping X,
> nothing.

Reports seem to indicate this happens to you but not everyone running
the same browser.  There may be some user-specific profile data which is
triggering this bug.  Have you tried running Firefox from a newly
created Unix user account?  If it still happens, it might be worthwhile
to start disabling plugins and extensions using the menu GUI to see if
it is any of those.  

You can run "firefox -safe-mode" from the command line to disable all of
these at once, to determine whether or not it is any of them.

--Beland