Bug#627348: chromium: "New Tab" often unresponsive the first time I start Chromium

[Torbjörn Andersson]

On 2011-06-02 18:08, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

It looks like it may be a plugin problem, tentatively I'd say it's 
related to gecko-media-player, but I'll do my best answering the 
questions anyway.

> What kind of machines are these, roughly speaking, and especially what
> kind of disks do they use?

Well, /proc/cpuinfo informs me that the CPU is an "Intel(R) Pentium(R) D 
CPU 3.40GHz".

As for the hard disk... I'm not sure. The hdparm command says "ATA 
device, with non-removable media" and that the model number is "WDC 
WD3200KS-00PFB0", if that means anything.

I remember I bought the computer shortly Windows Vista was released, 
because they asked me if I wanted that (I didn't :-), so it's not brand 
new but not really that old either.

> The other piece that might be puzzling in the above descriptions is
> that it seems the slower state is *permanent* until chromium is closed
> and relaunched again.  Is that true?  If so, it would be weird and
> indicate a simple bug (e.g., a race) rather than a design flaw, hence
> easier to track down.

If I understand the question correctly, then yes it misbehaves even 
after I kill the unresponsive page and open a new one, and it persists 
until I restart Chromium. It seems that I can load pages that are 
text-only, or which contain only small image files, but loading larger 
images is a problem. (It displays the page, but pictures are missing and 
after a while it becomes unresponsive.) I think the pictures is the main 
triggering factor, because I was able to reproduce it with the following 
steps:

* Clear the cache.
* Open Chromium. Wait for the "unresponsive tab" dialog to appear, as it 
usually does. Killed the unresponsive tab.
* Open a new tab and go to http://www.update.uu.se/~d91tan which worked fine
* Open a new tab and go to http://www.update.uu.se/~d91tan/AfterTheRain 
which worked fine
* Open one of the pictures in that directory. It got stuck, and after a 
while the tab was reported as unresponsive

> Can you reproduce this with "chromium --temp-profile" or "chromium
> --user-data-dir=/tmp/nonsense"?

I was able to reproduce it with "chromium --temp-profile".

I was able to reproduce it with "chromium --user-data-dir=/tmp/nonsense" 
both before and after it had created a /tmp/nonsense directory.

In both these cases, I had to make two or three attempts, but the method 
of reproducing it was never quite foolproof.

> What happens if you use "chromium http://www.nytimes.com/" (or some other
> pages)?  Is this specific to the new tab page, to some family of pages, or
> does it happen for all pages?

I was able to reproduce it with "chromium http://www.nytimes.com/".

> Does (temporarily) removing the Flash plugin help?

Unfortunately not. I was still able to reproduce it.

However, there are a couple of other plugins that I wasn't consciously 
aware that Chromium had picked up. I removed those (I should have tried 
that long ago) until about:plugins only reported "Chrome NaCl 
(Disabled)" and "Default Plug-in", and that seems to fix the problem. 
The packages I removed were:

icedtea-plugin
mozplugger
djview-plugin
gecko-mediaplayer

Some testing suggests that gecko-mediaplayer is the culprit. 
Reinstalling the other ones didn't reintroduce the problem. Reinstalling 
gecko-mediaplayer alone did.

> Does it print any messages to the console before you hit ^C?

Very little:

$ chromium
^CHandling SIGINT.
Check failed: g_shutdown_pipe_write_fd != -1
Handling SIGINT.
Successfully wrote to shutdown pipe, resetting signal handler.
^C

> Could you run chromium with --debug, catch it when it's hanging, hit
> ^C, and get a backtrace?  http://wiki.debian.org/Chromium/Debugging
> explains how.

Oh dear... Well, I hope this tells you more than it tells me. It's from 
getting Chromium to misbehave, and then pressing ^C once.

Regards,

Torbjörn Andersson
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