[ALUG] weird slowdown....

[Peter Alcibiades]

Have you had or heard of odd behaviour apparently, at least partly, from the 
combination of Firefox and Gnome?  After visiting a site to find out who an 
apparently well known singer is, I found FF paging through previous pages of 
its own volition, and the system as a whole hanging and slowing down.  The 
site (devoted to one Lily Allen if it helps) kept reappearing, but the same 
thing happened also with the Independent site, several pages of which 
suddenly reappeared in the middle of reading OSNews. I thought it must be 
something nefarious, but what?   The Independent?  It seemed to hang on OSN 
while waiting for bilbo.counted.

System Monitor doesn't reveal anything very odd, though there are spikes on 
the graph of 30% cpu usage, when the process table shows nothing using more 
than a few percent, and that is mainly system monitor itself.

Moving to Konqueror didn't help.  Deleting all cookies and turning off Java 
and Javascript didn't help.  Epiphany didn't help.  It happened a bit with OO 
but not to anything like the same extent.

I more or less fixed it finally by moving to KDE.  But the runaway process 
indicator occasionally pops up and warns about Firefox, if the threshold is 
set to 20%.

This is on Etch AMD64, a reasonably decent Sempron with 1G memory, which of 
course has FF 1.5, not 2.0.  Fully up to date.  This am in fact, it just 
updated a bunch of stuff, including CUPS.   Any ideas what it could be or on 
what else to check?

I am also getting slowdowns while typing this into Kmail, which is also 
generating one of those warnings....  Crazy.  How can it take 20%+ of cpu 
just to handle a few text entries?

Peter