[Bug 221842] [NEW] System suddenly slow down, high load-avg, almost unusable

[stek79]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: firefox

Hello guys,
        I'm experiencing some really weird and important slow downs on Hardy, updated with all the current patches.

>From the user point of view, the symptoms are simple: basically the
system gets irresponsive and every operation takes an amount of time
which is an order of magnitude higher than normale. No particular
activity is being done during those issues, I usually spend my time
surfing the net with FF3.

Since I'm a performance addicted guy, I made some measuerement of my
system in order to identify the bottleneks. Observing the system during
this weird behaviour, I've observed that there is a clear resource
bottleneck, which is my HD. Device utilization gets saturated at
95-100%, load-average rise to something like 2.8 to 4 (I have a single
CPU system).

Given those evidences, I took a look at the processes, in order to
identify the culprit. At first I was thinking about trackerd, but after
removing it the problem was still there.

So I measured my system with some SystemTap tools and iostat. Guess what
I found? The culprit seems to be FF3. Suddenly the disk start acting
with very high utilization, the process using the disk the most is
firefox and the read/written files seems to be the Cache dir of my
firefox profile.

I attach three pertinent files: a iotime output, disktop output and
iostat output. During that measurement, FF3 was open with only one tab
in the ubuntuforums homepage. I have not added any extension other than
what Ubuntu provided.

Please let me know what do you find, this problem yelds a really bad
user experience - a friend of mine wants to uninstall ubuntu for that
reason, and I have to admit that it is pretty annoying.

Thanks

Description:	Ubuntu 8.04
Release:	8.04

firefox:
  Installed: 3.0~b5+nobinonly-0ubuntu3
  Candidate: 3.0~b5+nobinonly-0ubuntu3
  Version table:
 *** 3.0~b5+nobinonly-0ubuntu3 0
        500 http://sm.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

** Affects: firefox (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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System suddenly slow down, high load-avg, almost unusable
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/221842
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