Ubuntu

Firefox freezes xorg

Asked by Dirk

Today I rebooted my machine (running Edgy) because an update from a few days or a week ago asked me to do so. Since then, xorg freezes up (>95% CPU) when I do something in Firefox. I reinstalled Firefox and deleted the complete .mozilla directory (no more extensions), but it's still happening.

When xorg is frozen, I can still move the mouse in the first monitor, but I cannot move it to the second screen. Clicks don't work. Keyboard doesn't respond (not even CapsLock). None of the gadgets in the Gnome panel (clock, system monitor) are being updated anymore. But the machine still accepts ssh, so I can logon from another machine and reboot cleanly.

I am using a Matrox card and after the last update I had to fix /boot/grub/menu.lst again. If I don't remove "splash" from the kernel line, the screen will be completely garbled. What else might have changed recently?

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Dirk (rptq) said : 		#1

Today, the update manager installed version 2.0.0.2 of
firefox, firefox-gnome-support, libnspr4 and libnss3.
The problem persists. Xorg goes above 99% CPU and stays there when I start using Firefox. Sometime it happens after 10 seconds, sometimes it takes a minute. Killing firefox doesn't help.

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Onkar Shinde (onkarshinde) said : 		#2

Can this be related to some malformed xorg configuration? Please try reconfiguring xorg with command 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg'. Your old configuration will be saved automatically.

If everything works after this you can compare new and old configuration.

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mp (mp-xmission) said : 		#3

I have nearly the same symptoms.

I can still move the mouse when the freeze happens, but I can't click on anything and the Gnome desktop gadgets all stop responding. This is happening almost every few minutes on my machine.

Here's the difference though: I'm using an Nvidia-based card and not a Matrox. Also, I've had sessions where I don't open FF at all and the problem still occurs. I've turned off Twinview and the problem still occurs.

xorg goes to 99% utilization and I have to SSH in to restart it.

I'm currently on the 'nv' driver and things have been stable for several minutes (which is longer than normal) but it's still too early to tell if that's going to make a real difference.

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Best Dirk (rptq) said : 		#4

I also had the problem once without FF. Only FF was the most "reliable" one to reproduce the problem.

I fixed my problem. The hint I needed came from this post:
http://matrox.tuxx-home.at/viewtopic.php?t=37

On Jan 27th, the update included a new version of xserver-xorg-core. This update replaced libglx.so among others, but I am supposed to use the libglx.so that came with my Matrox driver. Reinstalling the driver fixed the problem.

Another thing that I noticed only now: after reboot, the Matrox briefly flashes a logo screen. Normally this is blue. With the wrong library it was sortof greyish. Now it's blue again. ;-)