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#1 2017-07-04 00:18:01

CPUnltd
Member
From: Milwaukee, WI
Registered: 2009-12-05
Posts: 483
Website

Multimedia Webgtk-specific system freezing when browsing internet

I couldn't figure out where this topic belongs if it should be in another area, so feel free to migrate it if necessary.


The issue I'm experiencing (and have for quite some time now... years, at least) is that my system will grind to a hault (CPU or mem maxed out usage) when browsing on any browser that runs webgtk (from what I can tell). It's most noticeable when accessing facebook. I have had this problem freeze all of my laptop and desktop installations when browsing with opera, vivaldi, luakit, midori and a few other browsers I'm not remembering the names to at the moment. Seems that it's related to multimedia, but it's not affecting minitube or smtube. Please advice on what information I can give in order to troubleshoot this issue. Thank you all in advance.


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#2 2017-07-04 00:40:36

V1del
Forum Moderator
Registered: 2012-10-16
Posts: 21,426

Re: Multimedia Webgtk-specific system freezing when browsing internet

Some more info on your system, like available hardware resources, drivers, HW accel packages etc would be nice. Note that 2/4 of the browsers you list do not use webkitgtk, so that common thread seems to fall away. Have you checked dmesg/journal at the time of a freeze? Facebook isn't exactly a light website, and depending on your usage and if you scroll down a while the infinite news feed, might well suck up 2GB of RAM like it's nothing. FWIW facebook used to crash my chromium tab, because it went over the hard rlimits for a process thread. This has been "fixed" here by adding

ignore_rlimit_data

to my kernel params because that's what dmesg suggested when the kernel decided to kill a tab. You could probably just up that limit specifically and more controlled than with that option.

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#3 2017-07-04 04:45:58

CPUnltd
Member
From: Milwaukee, WI
Registered: 2009-12-05
Posts: 483
Website

Re: Multimedia Webgtk-specific system freezing when browsing internet

It's happened on many different configurations (including laptop and desktop). It's currently happening on a System76 laptop with a Core 2 Duo P9700, 6GB of RAM, and an Nvidia graphics card (running the latest nouveau). This freeze happens on the browsers mentioned even if the browser is the only thing running. I've had a couple of chances to htop before the system came to a complete screeching hault and I'd see multiple instance (over 10, sometimes more than 15) of a path related to the browser that's open and something involving webkit. I will recreate the problem on purpose so I can copy the info down and report back the exact item I see multiple instances of. The thing is that they will either push the CPU to 100% (on both cores) or the memory to 100%. Will see if I can provide more info after making it happen on purpose. Which browsers are non webkit based? I was pretty sure that all 4 utilized webkit since that was part of what I'd see in the htop output for all 4 of them.


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#4 2017-07-04 07:33:16

V1del
Forum Moderator
Registered: 2012-10-16
Posts: 21,426

Re: Multimedia Webgtk-specific system freezing when browsing internet

Opera and Vivaldi both use Chrome's Blink as far as I know.

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#5 2017-07-04 18:08:31

CPUnltd
Member
From: Milwaukee, WI
Registered: 2009-12-05
Posts: 483
Website

Re: Multimedia Webgtk-specific system freezing when browsing internet

Interesting. Well, Vivaldi is the main culprit (only because I've been using it more than the others). I do find it interesting though, that I seem to have altered the problem somehow with a few additional packages I installed the other day. I still get the high RAM usage (opt/... /Vivaldi.bin - - type=render - - enable-blink-features=ResizeObserver - - field-trial-handle=1 - - primordial-pipe-token=XXX123XXX takes up a sizable chunk of my RAM, and when I kill the multiple processess for each "XXX123XXX" via htop, a big drop in RAM usage happens) but it's not bottlenecking the system and causing a freeze (posting this reply with facebook AND youtube running in other tabs. . It's definitely choking, but not freezing. Youtube is pushing the CPU usage up while facebook is pushing the RAM usage up. I installed mplayer, smplayer, smtube, youtube-mpv-git, and youtube-viewer. When playing youtube via Vivaldi, I saw an entry in htop related to the GPU. I can type it up if you're curious to see what it is. Htop won't let me copy/paste, so I have to manually type it up on my phone and save it to my google keep so I can copy/paste it here via the laptop (like I did with the above htop entry). I'm thinking that youtube-mpv-git is what changed the situation because it is said to use mplayer (mpv) to play online videos through your browser (but it doesn't specify which browser it's for, so I'm guessing it's a universal "plugin" of sorts). I can try to provide more info, but the complete freezing of the system seems to have stopped, but it's still problematic since watching a single youtube video via the browser leads to 100% CPU usage... and Facebook pushes up (nearly maxes out) the RAM usage.


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#6 2017-07-04 18:47:03

CPUnltd
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From: Milwaukee, WI
Registered: 2009-12-05
Posts: 483
Website

Re: Multimedia Webgtk-specific system freezing when browsing internet

A second instance of Facebook on any other browser practically freezes the system. It took me about 20 minutes to get to the point of being able to kill the other browser (in this case, midori). Couldn't even get the login screen to load fully. Checked htop, and the RAM was at about 95% or so. Closed Midori and RAM is back down to 80% usage with Facebook running on Vivaldi.

EDIT: running just Vivaldi (and whatever is running in the background pushes the RAM to 66% usage.

Last edited by CPUnltd (2017-07-04 21:26:29)


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