chromium-16.0.912.77: gui freezes when waiting for network

[Evan Martin]

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 9:07 PM, Yuri <yuri at rawbw.com> wrote:
> This version of chromium on FreeBSD has this annoying quality that very
> often while waiting for network gui becomes frozen. Sometimes with the
> "busy" cursor. Scrollbars not working, links not working.
> I compared with Ubuntu, it currently has exactly the same version of
> chromium, and gui is much more responsive there. I don't see such severe
> problem there.
>
> I understand browser as a state machine. It always waits for something,
> network, user interaction or screen repaint, but while waiting other parts
> should be functional. Any time network operation is pending gui should show
> whatever is available by that time.

We've put a huge amount of effort into making Chrome never block.  For
example, when a web page tries to load a font, that request is sent
out to fontconfig, which accesses the disk; because accessing the disk
is a blocking call, we use a separate subprocess specifically to wrap
fontconfig so that the browser will not hang.

Here's some more I've written on the subject:
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2010/11/thread-restrictions.html

I am sad to read about your problem.  Have you tried breaking into it
in a debugger when it is paused?  If you "gdb -p PID" and then "info
threads" and dump that on this list, I can help diagnose it further.