> From: "Eric Schenk" <schenk@cs.toronto.edu>
> Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 15:10:12 -0400
> Subject: Re: Delay in job control
>
> Uwe Bonnes <bon@elektron.ikp.physik.th-darmstadt.de> writes:
> >I looked a little more about the job control behaviour of netscape 3.0.
> [Description of netscape slowing down, hanging].
>
> I don't have any additional clues as to the cause, but I can confirm
> that I have seen similar problems on a DX2/66 20Meg machine (32Meg swap).
>
> What I've had happen several times now is that just after initiating
> a text search inside netscape my machine starts swaping madly
> for anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute. After that X hangs completely.
> No keyboard response, no mouse response. Nothing. I've left a machine
> in this state for up to an hour. Something is still going, because
> some scheduled cron jobs ran and registered in the system logs after
> the console froze up. I'm guessing that X ran out of memory and
> did not die gracefully, but I don't have any evidence to back this up.
>
> Occasionally I'll see the same sort of swaping behavior when running
> netscape, followed by a freeze lasting between 30 seconds and 2 minutes,
> after which the machine seems to recover itself and procede normally.
> This behavior has occured throughout the 2.0.x kernels, and perhaps
> earlier, although I can't recall for certain when it started.
>
> Up to now I haven't had enough information to really give a bug report,
> but perhaps this information will give someone a clue as to what is happening.
> - -- eric
>
> - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Eric Schenk www: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~schenk
> Department of Computer Science email: schenk@cs.toronto.edu
> University of Toronto
Just a suggestion - Netscape can write some HUGE files in your
~/.netscape directory (the history file especially) and feels
compelled to write to them every few minutes, even if you've been
staring at that page all the time. If it's been a year since you
cleaned out that file, and/or your home directory is mounted across a
network (this is when I notice the worst), you might want to take a
look at it.
Granted, I don't experience the X hangs at the same time - X is still
fairly usable while Netscape is doing this.
Good luck!
-Brett A. Thomas
quark@baz.com