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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

Anecdote regarding this new FF:

I would find frequent cases where my system would stall for 10-20s (could not caps lock toggle, pointer stopped moving). I almost always have just Chrome and gnome-terminal open (Ubuntu 16.04). I had attributed it to either a hardware or BIOS/firmware defect.

Now, after switching to Firefox I have gone a week without seeing those stalls.

YMMV -- I never bothered to investigate, it could be something as simple as slightly-less-memory-consumption from FF, or still a hardware defect that FF doesn't happen to trigger.

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Typical behavior when the OS is writing to the swap space to free some ram.

If that ever happens again, you can run "free" on the terminal to see whether this is the case.

This sounds vaguely like what I've been experiencing on recent Chrome versions. On Windows I've had Chrome randomly hang... initially on the network, then after a few seconds even the UI freezes. When that happens, if I launch Firefox and try to access the network, it hangs too. But programs that don't try to access the network don't hang. Then after maybe (very roughly) 30 seconds, it all goes back to normal. No idea what's been going on but it seems like you might be experiencing a same thing, and it seems like a recent bug on Chrome versions, not a firmware issue... I'm just confused at how it affects other programs. It didn't use to be like this just a few weeks ago.

I notice chrome having these issues if I'm running out of memory or if another program is trying to read from the hard drive at the same time.

I am most definitely not running out of memory or having other programs active. I easily have like > 10 GB free RAM and it happens when nothing else is open.

Like I was suggesting early -- my habits haven't changed. It's started doing this quite recently. It wasn't like this a few weeks ago.

Just a shot in the dark, but do you have an nVidia GPU? Some drivers caused hangs with Chrome when GPU acceleration/rasterization was enabled in the browser settings.

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