What Freezes the System: Firefox or ext3?

“A few days ago, the first Release Candidate for Firefox 3 was
launched but some problems still remained unfixed, like the one
that caused the browser (and sometimes the entire system) to
freeze. Some persons blamed Firefox for the freeze, while others
the ext3 filesystem and sqlite.

“The problem seems to be related to fsync (), a function that
synchronizes changes to a file, transferring the data to a storage
device. In a bug report, someone described the way in which the
excessive usage of fsync () occurred…”

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