Waterfox / Flash Player / Nvidia / Win7 HP 64-bit problems

[VirtualLarry]

I've noticed severe slowdowns in my browser lately too, but I'm not really sure of the cause.

The rig is a Gateway slimline PC tower, with a Sandy Bridge G630 2.7Ghz dual-core, 8GB DDR3, a 2TB Seagate 7200RPM hybrid drive, DVD-RW, and NVidia GT 430 low-profile video card. Internet is a FIOS 50/25 connection, but it's in the other room over wireless, using a DD-WRT N300 router as a wireless bridge, so maybe 20-30Mbit/sec connection.

Anyways, it seems that both Waterfox 27.0.2 and 28.0 get "thread stuck errors", where they start to chew up 100% of one CPU core, and are very unresponsive. Middle-clicking to start autoscroll, has a 2sec delay.

I've used 27.0.2 and 28.0 on my 1007U Celeron laptop, with 4GB of RAM, and it doesn't seem to have this problem, with a huge pile more of tabs. It has an 80GB Intel X25-M G2 SSD.

Now, I cloned a friend's rig, from a 64GB Microcenter G2 (first-gen Sandforce) SSD, to one of these 2TB SSHDs too, and after booting it on his rig, it had some unexplained bogged-down-ness too. More than I would have expected, from just an ordinary 7200RPM HDD (then again, I haven't used one of those in quite some time).

I don't know if the problems are with Waterfox (but why doesn't it appear with my laptop too?), or Flash Player (running the newest 13.x on the Gateway, probably an older one on the laptop), or NVidia (newest 335.x WHQLs have caused issues for other people on this forum as well).

I haven't had PC problems like this in some time.

 

[Matt1970]

I am confused. You closed your rig and ran it on a friends?

 

[VirtualLarry]

No, I cloned my friend's C-colon drive, which was a 64GB SSD, to an identical 2TB SSHD, and booted it in his rig (same hardware as the SSD was on), and got similar slowness to how my rig with the same model 2TB SSHD performs.

 

[Ketchup]

Just to make sure we are on the same page: if it's always Waterfox 27.0.2 using the CPU like crazy, just on this system, we are thinking it is Waterfox having issues with a particular driver?

I think it would be interesting to see if Firefox exhibits this same behavior, since AFAIK they are still fairly close.

 

[R0H1T]

Seems like a script running on the page is becoming unresponsive, I've had this problem multiple times with autopager so if you have it installed try disabling it &/or any other addon which loads multiple scripts on webpages viz greasemonkey or stylish. Also how did you determine "thread stuck error" because unless you're using something like a process explorer or process hacker you won't see the invidual threads eating up all those CPU cycles & AFAIK firefox (or even waterfox) doesn't this particular error, at least I haven't seen anything like that displayed by the program itself.

 

[Smoove910]

not sure if it's related, but you do know there are certain Windows settings that are disabled if you are running an SSD? So if you cloned an SSD drive to a mechanical HD, you also cloned those disabled settings.

Check your paging file
Check superfetch
Check TRIM

Prolly some others, but thought I would make mention.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, one of the threads gets stuck in some kind of infinite loop, and chews up 100% of CPU time on one core.

I should probably disable HW accell. and see if it happens again.

I've already gotten a TDR error then a bluescreen with the NV kernel driver mentioned, while simply browsing with Waterfox (with a bunch of Newegg tabs being opened).

 

[R0H1T]

Well, one of the threads gets stuck in some kind of infinite loop, and chews up 100% of CPU time on one core.

Like I said how do you determine it's a thread stuck error ? I say this because the symptom you said points to the windows scheduler not allocating the load properly across all available cores, it could be a third party program doing this or someone messed up one of the key (NT) scheduler settings on your OS. This is what I generally use to determine what's causing a program malfunction, like yours ~

I should probably disable HW accell. and see if it happens again.

I've already gotten a TDR error then a bluescreen with the NV kernel driver mentioned, while simply browsing with Waterfox (with a bunch of Newegg tabs being opened).

Yup that's the display driver crashing your system, happens quite frequently on old(er) systems.