On Sun, 2007-11-25 at 01:27 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > recently, my fedora 8-based gateway laptop will, for no obvious > reason, suddenly go berserk in terms of disk activity, to the point > where it effectlvely becomes unusable -- that is, simple keyboard > activity takes over a minute to get a response. > > it just happened again, at which point i switched out of my gnome > desktop (it took over two minutes to get back to a virtual console), > where "top" showed nothing in particular hogging either memory or CPU, > but it also showed a 5-minute load average of over 20! > > "free", on the other hand, showed both memory and swap to be maxed > out in terms of use. the standard disgnostic tools didn't identify > anything as the culprit, so i just killall'ed firefox-bin, and > everything returned to normal, at which point "top" showed that two > instances of npviewer.bin were now hogging over 50% of the CPU. > > at this point, i'm convinced that npviewer.bin is an evil, evil > piece of software and i'm sorely tempted to get rid of it. is anyone > else seeing this kind of bad craziness? > I see this kind of stuff when i accidentally leave firefox looking at a munin graph page for the night. It seems to me that images you look at never get released from memory or something. This has nothing to do with npviewer.bin (part of nspluginwrapper) however. > rday > > p.s. firefox, in general, has been impressing me less and less as > time has gone by. after i finally killed it above, once again, it > left a youtube image embedded firmly in my desktop, which could only > be cleared by logging out of X entirely. > > i think it's finally time to switch browsers. Or try to remove nspluginwrapper or not use the flash plugin, which seems to be the reason for a lot of performance problems as well. It is also the flash plugin (maybe in combination with nspluginwrapper) that was the reason for the youtube image, you could have removed it by killing npviewer.bin
