(This has been possible for years now)
If you have a few a lot of Internet Explorer tabs open, perhaps nearing ~100+, the machine will start to hang and freeze. As you're opening tabs, you know you're about halfway to this happening when you're scrolling a webpage with the mouse wheel and it suddenly stops scrolling despite the mouse wheel still moving and then beeps start playing from the motherboard system-speaker (which is the *only* time I ever hear those kind of beeps). It's like the machine can't keep up fast enough, so it beeps to say "Overloaded!!".
This *only* happens with IE, no other browsers or programs. In other browsers, I frequently load up hundreds of tabs, and sometimes to the point of even crashing the program (and the 16GB+ of memory it's using) -- however, this *never* affects the rest of the machine.
When you open a lot of IE tabs, system-wide use begins to freeze. The mouse cursor gets severely delayed and choppy. Even Windows GUI windows painting and refreshing gets slowed to a crawl: you can literally see Windows repainting on the screen (in all programs, no just IE). Mouse clicks lag 15-30 seconds behind.
When this is happening, Task Manager shows that IE doesn't appear to be taking a lot of CPU (across the 10-15 iexplore.exe's open), so it's not like it's killing the CPU. Likewise, they're not using up the entire system's memory, either. Nevertheless, it takes 5-10 minutes to slowly script out mouse movements and keypresses to force-close the IE programs -- as soon as they close, the system immediately resumes "breathing" again and functioning at normal speed.
Any idea what's going on here? Process Lasso doesn't do anything to quell this (probably because IE isn't dominating CPU usage), and PL reports full system responsiveness.
How can I find what's causing a *system*-wide freeze/lag/stutter like this with a program?
It makes me wonder if IE is somehow specially attached into the OS, or perhaps if the OS gives IE some preferential privilege to system resources, thus enabling it to bring the system to a crawl.
Now that I'm thinking about it, when this happens, the experience is nearly *exactly* like when CPU Eater is active! However, CPU isn't getting crushed in this case.
