On 12/27/2009 3:16 PM, Jack Dodds wrote:
My system is a 1.8 GHz Pentium using Debian stable. I update frequently from debian.org. Several weeks ago, I started noticing that Iceweasel would sometimes stop responding to mouse or keyboard inputs for about five seconds. After each such "hang" it would resume operating normally.
To further isolate the problem I ran top in a Gnome terminal. To be
specific, I ran terminal, su'ed to root, then lucy:/home/jack# nice --adjustment=-20 top I arranged the windows so that I could use iceweasel without covering up the terminal window, then browsed until a "hang" happened. What this showed was that during a "hang", iceweasel (firefox-bin) was using close to 100% of the CPU. However, this did not stop the terminal or any other application from responding. In fact, further testing showed that during a hang, if I was quick, I could go to another application window, use the mouse or keyboard and get a response, then return to iceweasel, and iceweasel would still not respond until after a significant delay.
I have some hangs too, the slowdowns include moving from non-Windows to Windows, and also when MS Security Essentials is installed. This is true for Thunderbird 2.x and Thunderbird 3.0, as well as Firefox and Iceweasel. But not Outlook or non-mozilla.
It feels like a garbage collector or defragmenting. Something similar has been happening to my Kindle* since it updated to ver. 2.3.
Mark Allums *Amazon Kindles run ARM Linux, although not Debian.