Still crash unattended? [LWN.net]

Still crash unattended?

Posted Nov 8, 2011 22:19 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165)
Parent article: Firefox 8 released

The most salient feature of 7 is that it only crashes when I haven't used it for a couple of days. Every Monday, I restart it, and it runs through Friday without hiccups, and then crashes over the weekend when I'm not here. I guess I could think of it as GC that actually works; this way its RSS rarely goes much over 2G. If it would only put its windows back on the right desktops on a restore, I would count that as success.

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Still crash unattended?

Posted Nov 8, 2011 22:42 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

I'm now running the 9 alpha, but I ran the 7 beta for several weeks before migrating and didn't have any crashing problems. before that (on 6) I was having firefox killed by the OOM killer on a frequent basis, check that you aren't having a problem along those lines.

Still crash unattended?

Posted Nov 9, 2011 3:15 UTC (Wed) by set (guest, #4788) [Link]

Firefox was getting killed by the OOM killer for me at random intervals ranging from days to weeks of uptime. I upgraded to version 6 and it seemed to get worse. I ended up moving my ~/.mozilla directory aside, starting fresh and the memory gobbling stopped. Then I migrated the custom settings I had made under ~/.mozilla that I still understood, and it has remained stable ever since. I cannot even guess how many years and incarnations of mozilla browsers had been using that, or what could possibly have been causing the problem, but I am back to my normal usage; 12-20 tabs open running continuously.

Still crash unattended?

Posted Nov 9, 2011 6:13 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

I believe OOM sends a SIGKILL, while firefox is getting SIGSEGV. But I'll try set's suggestion; .mozilla on this box goes back (only!) five years. Firefox is running under gdb this week, so on Monday we'll know more -- unless gdb crashes first.

Firefox stability

Posted Nov 9, 2011 10:48 UTC (Wed) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

I used to have very frequent crashes on Linux, and a bug where the IFRAME popped out into a window - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=263160 - which made it almost unusable on Linux.

These issues went away some time ago and Firefox now seems as stable on Linux as it is on Windows. I like that the latest Firefox still works on older Linux distros (Ubuntu 8.04), as does Opera - Chrome says 'your OS is unsupported' and refuses to upgrade itself.

I did find that Firefox 8 doesn't properly reload tabs when the new 'only load tabs when selected' feature is turned on (using Windows) so that seems a bit buggy still.

Still crash unattended?

Posted Nov 9, 2011 14:54 UTC (Wed) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link] (1 responses)

It's god's way of telling you to switch off the computer when you're not using it, instead of letting the software burn joules during gratuitous self reflection.

Still crash unattended?

Posted Nov 9, 2011 16:16 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Yeah, then you can burn joules doing gratuitous full fscks every month. :)