Netscape sucks

Submitted: Saturday, March 20, 1999 14:50

Last night, I was up until after sunrise typing about Forces of Nature in my movielog. That movie really got to me I guess. It hit a nerve in my consciousness about stuff I've been trying to process for quite a while.

Anyway, after typing for over four hours about it, my X session slowed to a crawl and the hard disk started thrashing like crazy, so I did the Ctrl-Alt-F2 thing to get out to a text console. It took the system about 30 seconds to process my keystroke and switch my screen over, and after I logged in, before I could determine what was causing the problem, the X server totally died and restarted, totally trashing all my carefully thought out prose.

As the reality of 5:00am and an entire night's work lost without hope of recovery sunk in, I almost lost my composure, but decided the only thing to do would be to retype everything I could remember right away while it was still fresh. So that's what I did. Got all the main ideas back I think, but the style of the first is lost forever.

That wasn't the end though. Just as I was wrapping it up -- for a second time -- the same thing started happening again. The hard drive going like crazy, the mouse slowing to a bumpy crawl, the system becoming completely unresponsive. This time, I knew switching VCs was a bad idea, so I tried to wait it out. When the thrashing didn't stop, and Netscape wouldn't give me any feedback after hitting Submit, I hit my hotkey to switch virtual desktops typed the trusty top command into an xterm.

It took a good thirty seconds to load, but the output only made things more mysterious. Nothing was totally hogging CPU time, although Netscape was much higher than it should have been at 40%. The kernel level usage was exceedingly high, but why was a mystery. I tried opening an xsysinfo and waited nearly a minute for it to come up. Now things started to become clearer.

Both the memory usage bar and the swap meter were all the way to the right. Every bit of memory was consumed. Going back to the xterm window running top, I hit the capital M to sort processes by memory usage. Of course. The guilty party became obvious. Netscape, right there at the top with a modest 171 megabyte footprint.

Since it was obvious that this sorry excuse for a web browser had every intention of consuming any memory it could find, I promptly suspended it, but did not kill it. It had what I wanted, an hour and a half's worth of redone work. The hard drive still thrashing, I killed my Gnome panel to free up enough memory to at least be able to type "ls" without having to wait all night to see the output.

To make a long story short, I did something like this:

su
cd /proc
grep --before-context=150 --after-context=150 -e "Sandra Bullock" kcore | strings > /home/bitscape/scraps
vi /home/bitscape/scraps

Luckily, this did the trick, and I got almost all the text my second entry attempt back before cautiously sending Netscape the kill -s 9.

I've gotta go to the store now, but that pretty much sums up what happened. Right now, I'm activily monitoring memory and processor usage, and I can see Netscape's memory usage gradually climbing. More speculation and commentary later.