Occasionally, when I'm browsing a site with a -lot- of pictures (ie my mom's online scrapbook, et cetera), X will have what I have come to call a seizure. Everything gets excrutiatingly choppy, top shows X is using 80%+ CPU, my Memory and Swap usage are maxed, and eventually I can't do anything. No switching to other terminals, no anything -- only a hard shutdown will fix anything.

Looking at /var/log/messages, I see the following:
Repeat almost ad nauseum. To give you an idea of what happens if I leave it going all night, here's what `cat /var/log/messages| grep -c configured` gives: 41635

During this whole process, of whatever it is doing, the HDD light is flashing on for a second, off for two, on for one, et cetera. I assume that'd due to the Swap and Memory being full, but my questions are...

a) Why is that happening?
b) What is it doing?
c) How can I prevent it from crashing my system?

Thanks in advance,
-- Poetics

Could I get this moved to Software maybe?

TIA

Why would you move it to software?

Anyway, instinct tells me that what you are seeing in the logs is likely not the cause of the problem, but a side effect of it.

Granted it is happening at a very rapid rate, but I can't imagine a modern computer could be that bogged down by udev updating it's links a few times a second. Are there any interesting entries before the mass udev errors?

And what browser is this with? Or do you have this problem with all browsers?

You could also try disabling udev for a day or so, and see if the problem still shows up.

There is absolutely nothing anomalous prior to what I posted above. About 10 minutes after a few --MARK-- entries, the above would start.

I've only seen this with Firefox, but then again I don't use any other browser, either. I agree that whatever is causing this is not likely what is being reported, but as you said this is only a side effect. I'm trying to figure out what is causing this so I can prevent it in the future.

And I figured I'd ask for it to be moved to Software, as I realized it wasn't a Slackware-specific issue (I assume), and after 40+ views without a response perhaps a larger userbase would see it in Software.

Just a Bump.

Problem does not occur unless I'm browsing a site with many many many picture downloads (like the Thanksgiving album, with more than 300 pictures (20-40k) loading). Generally I'm also running Gaim and Xmms, but those have never been a problem in the past. I don't see that any other Firefox user has had this problem, so I can discount that as well... maybe?

I wouldn't say you are the only user with such problems.

My own machine crashes in almost the exact same way (no messages in any of the logs however) when trying to load some media files with mplayerplug-in.

Though that might be the fault of mplayerplug-in, and not FireFox, as of yet, I have not managed to figure out which one is to blame.

As for your problem, I would definitely try another browser. You could start with the simple ones (like Dillo) and then move on to something like Opera.

Packages for both Dillo and Opera can be found for Slackware 10.2 on LinuxPackages.net, so it would be a simple matter to install them for a round of testing, and then remove them when you are done.

You could also try starting FireFox from the console, which will put some debug messages in the console window. Of course, if the machine crashes that fast, you might not have time to switch back to the console to read it.

Have you considered the possibility of errors in the HTML of the page? And how much physical RAM do you have, both in total, and with your machine running in it's normal state when you browse the web? Perhaps there are simply too many images per page, and it isn't necessarily any problem on your machine itself? As great as FireFox is, it is pretty much universally recognized that there is some memory leak in it, and it is notorious for eating up all of the physical memory on a machine if given the opportunity.

Would it be possible for you to provide a link to one of these sites so that we could look at them and note our system's ability to handle it? Unless they are pages of a personal nature, of course (I notice you mention a family photo-album as one of them).

Thank you for the suggestions, MS3FGX; I'd rather not provide a link due to the nature of the pictures (my parents are kinda paranoid about pics of my young sister getting out), but I could browse just fine when there weren't many pictures on the site.

No problems with mplayerplug-in, at least nothing like this or even crashing at all. I'll see about Opera and see if it is some sort of memory-leak problem with Firefox. I have a healthy dose of RAM in this thing (512mb), and a 1gb swap partition. If I'm on my toes, the computer will let me switch to a terminal and run Top, before it stops responding. Xmms keeps playing, top keeps reporting, but absolutely nothing else functions (switching tty's, closing applications, et cetera). Top reports that X is using 78%+ of my memory, but only reports that every two or three seconds before X vanishes from the list before returning.

To monitor my Swap/RAM usage I have the gkrellM applet, so I can see that the computer is using 100% of both. Is there a command like top that will show me what programs are using the swap? I'm wondering if there is some way for me to flush the Swap. *shrug*

If I'm careful with my browsing it won't happen, and my parents don't update the pictures too often so I don't browse it much, but I'm trying to be a good Slacker and figure out the root cause for every problem

It is interesting that X is shown as using all of your resources, and not FireFox. But until you try with another browser, there is really no way to tell what is the culprit.

If it is happening in other browsers, then I would have to say it is just the shear amount of pictures on the one page. Beyond that, it would have to be some sort of bug/leak in libjpeg or something (I assume these are jpeg, I don't recall you mentioning a format).