Firefox And D State

Home » CentOS » Firefox And D State
CentOS 6 Comments

Previously when firefox went catatonic to the point that I could not even scroll, its CPU usage had gone to 100%+. Now top tells me that firefox, Web Content (with a space) or sometimes kswap… has process state D, uninterruptible sleep.

Any suggestions on how to deal?

I often have a lot of tabs open, so discovering the right one was hard enough before. Usually, it was something relatively new, so that helped. Not so much anymore. I think a lot of it is just waiting (D) for ads or running them.

Closing and reopening sometimes works, but then I have to go find all the video ads and stop them one at a time.

6 thoughts on - Firefox And D State

  • I had that problem… and yes, it was some site’s page with wild or outright broken javascript. Installed NoScript, a Firefox add-on, and using that, severely limit what javascript can run. Since then I’ve been good.

  • Michael Hennebry wrote:
    blocking or unblocking *everything* by default. Geez, in this webmail, I
    hit reply, and a popup asks me if I want to open a document of type html, and it’s the hosting provider… and yet, nothing on the webmail page is blocked.

    mark

  • Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult to determine which script eats up the system’s resources, notably its CPU and RAM). Moreover, NoScript can only blacklist domain names, not offensive (probably defective) scripts.

    NoScript, though, shouldn’t take the blame for this problem.  A lot of websites use javascript and use it too much.  In addition, many websites use code from other sites over which they have no control.  And Firefox, which is in many ways a really effective and useful browser, provides no tools (none I know of) which allows users even just to track processes launched by a visited website, let alone throttle or kill those which are causing problems.  It’s a serious problem which deserves a lot more attention than it’s getting.