Issue opening apps when firefox open despite enough memory

English Applications
#1

I’ve been getting a weird issue where if I have firefox (3.6) open, I frequently cannot open other apps or even dolphin until I force quit firefox. However, when I look at “top” or sysinfo, it appears I have enough memory. This has been happening since about 1 month or so after I installed openSUSE 11.2 and has been getting progressively worse.

Sometimes when I try to open dolphin, it does nothing. If I then force quit firefox, dolphin suddenly opens up. And sometimes dolphin or other apps will just hang and I have to force quit them or quite firefox.

Right now, sysinfo says:

Total memory (RAM): 1.4 GiB
Free memory: 541.6 MiB (+ 506.1 MiB Caches)
Free swap: 2.0 GiB

But I’ve seen Free Memory listed as low as 27MB, but I’ve NEVER seen Free Swap be less than 2GB (NEVER).

Firefox (listed in “top”) has a 5.6% share of the CPU and a 7% share of the MEM. I’ve seen it higher but never anything insane.

Using:
openSUSE 11.2
KDE 4.3.4
Linux 2.6.31.8-0.1-default i686
AMD Sempron™ Processor 3100+ 1.8 GHZ
nVIDIA G98 GForce 8400 GS with nvidia driver

Any ideas why this is occurring?

#2

Clear info, cheers.

It’s not memory, your swap is untouched, there’s 500 MB free.
Start FF from a terminal window, watch the output and see if you see any errors or warnings. If so, copy and paste them here, please.

#3

Running from command line:

(firefox-bin:2260): Gdk-WARNING **: XID collision, trouble ahead

Also, when I quit firefox (after starting from icon on the taskbar, it went to 95% and then 98% usage of the CPU and just hung there (for well over a minute until I finally force quit it). After I post this message, I’ll quit this command-line-started firefox and let you know what happens.

UPDATE: Ok, when I quit from the command line it also went to 95-98% CPU BUT only for about 5-7 seconds and then it quit. Whereas the one started from an icon on the taskbar never quits.

#4

Not sure if the Firefox never quitting has anything to do with the issue when trying to open other apps and dolphin though.