Short time line of what happened: On January 28, I was doing some playing around with eye-candy on my X desktop, and started running animations (from Xscreensaver) as by desktop background. At the same time I was browsing the internet using firefox-2.0.0.1. The operation of the desktop was smooth and CPU usage hardly ever went above 30% (sporadic spikes when I load new pages). I was monitoring the CPU use because I want to make sure that the eye-candy won't affect day-to-day operation of the desktop.
On January 29, I upgrade firefox from 2.0.0.1 to 2.0.0.1-r2. (My box is on ~x86) I don't remember whether the web browsing experience is any different. Since I wasn't paying attention. On Febuary 2nd, I upgrade xorg from 7.1 to 7.2, which also pulled in an upgrade for xorg-server, libXdamage, and other things. Starting yesterday (the 3rd of Feb), I noticed lock-ups when ever firefox is open. At first I thought it was the fault of the animated background, but then I found out that it still happened if I started a no-frills, barebone fvwm session. I tried almost all of my other X applications, and none of them had these behaviour (mplayer, inkscape, gimp, abiword included). When I start firefox, the cpu use for X shots up to 90+ percent (for X, not for firefox) for several minutes, and everytime I open a new tab X cpu use goes up to 90+ percent for several minutes, during which firefox is completely unresponsive, and xterms that I opened have a lag of round 0.5 - 2 seconds between keypress and character appearing on screen. Basically, firefox would, every now and then, cause my entire desktop to seize up for minutes at a time. I took a look at b.g.o., and the closest thing I found was a case where the solution was to change to a sane set of CFLAGs an to unmerge the known-to-be-unstable gplflash?? (can't remember the name, an OSS attempt at reproducing flash, was removed from portage recently, possibly because the adobe takeover of flashplayer). I don't even know if this is actually a bug or some stupid misconfiguration on my part. Any ideas of what I can check before I possibly make an ass of myself on b.g.o. by having a problem that I don't really know how to describe well. Thanks, W -- "The suit into which the man's body had been stuffed looked as if it's only purpose in life was to demonstrate how difficult it was to get this sort of body into a suit. " Sortir en Pantoufles: up 58 days, 16:35 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
