Nasty Safari bug with ESPN Forums

[HiRez]

Hi, I'd like to know if anyone else has this problem as I cannot find anything else about it online. In Safari, I visit the ESPN forums, for example:

http://boards.espn.go.com/boards/mb/mb?sport=mlb&id=general

Something on that page causes one core of the CPU to go to near 100%, and stay there even after exiting Safari. In top it shows up as "kernel_tas", which is pid 0 so of course it cannot be killed since it's the root process. The ONLY way to fix it after it starts appears to be rebooting the machine. On multiple Intel Macs running Leopard 10.5.4 (quad-core Mac Pro, dual-core iMac, dual-core MBP) this bug is 100% reproducible for me. Anyone seeing the same? (Sorry if it makes you reboot your machine).

 

[munson]

Hi, I'd like to know if anyone else has this problem as I cannot find anything else about it online. In Safari, I visit the ESPN forums, for example:

http://boards.espn.go.com/boards/mb/mb?sport=mlb&id=general

Something on that page causes one core of the CPU to go to near 100%, and stay there even after exiting Safari. In top it shows up as "kernel_tas", which is pid 0 so of course it cannot be killed since it's the root process. The ONLY way to fix it after it starts appears to be rebooting the machine. On multiple Intel Macs running Leopard 10.5.4 (quad-core Mac Pro, dual-core iMac, dual-core MBP) this bug is 100% reproducible for me. Anyone seeing the same? (Sorry if it makes you reboot your machine).

No problems here. Not really sure what's going on, but that sucks a lot. My CPU spikes a tiny but, up to 20% or so when I go to the page, but that's it. Goes back down in a couple sec. Did you try Googling the process? I'm sure you could get some info there.

 

[HiRez]

Thanks for checking, munson. Dunno what the deal is. Is seems Intel + Safari related because it won't do it on Firefox, and I can't get it to happen on either browser on a G5 PPC machine. It might have to do with a specific ad that was inserted or something (Flash, Java, JS, whatever). "kernel_tas" is the first process the computer runs when it boots and all other processes are spawned from that, so there's no way to restart or kill it without rebooting, unfortunately. But that process can represent a bunch of core OS stuff linked to any number of other things, so it's hard to say what really caused it in the first place.

 

[whooleytoo]

For me, CPU usage goes very high for about 20-30 seconds, then when the page finishes loading it's fine.

 

[munson]

Thanks for checking, munson. Dunno what the deal is. Is seems Intel + Safari related because it won't do it on Firefox, and I can't get it to happen on either browser on a G5 PPC machine. It might have to do with a specific ad that was inserted or something (Flash, Java, JS, whatever). "kernel_tas" is the first process the computer runs when it boots and all other processes are spawned from that, so there's no way to restart or kill it without rebooting, unfortunately. But that process can represent a bunch of core OS stuff linked to any number of other things, so it's hard to say what really caused it in the first place.

Actually, I'm running 10.5.4 on an Intel iMac. And Safari.