Firefox freezes

Message

sysXcep · Post by **sysXcep** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 12:00 pm

This is some kind of spin-off of Mysterious Freeze.

Symptoms

raf wrote: I run doom3 and ut2004 without any crashes (nvidia binaries). I Run many different applications: openoffice, spice, spectre, Cadence, Matlab, etc. Some times, VERY rarely a program might hang. That's ok, I just kill it and start it again. Nothing else gets disturbed. HOWEVER firefox has the ability to freeze my system dead (except for the mouse which still moves uselessly around the screen). I use firefox ALL the time and it hangs my system once every three days or so. This is the ONLY application that can do this to my system.

Well, it's the same here.

Questions

- Is it really firefox? (nearly shure...)
- Is there a way to reproduce this problem?
- What can we do? (Workaround, Bugreport...)

raf · Post by **raf** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 3:02 pm

Hi,

I'll post here as well from now on. We'll see if we can get to the bottom of this! BTW I would be VERY surprised if it really was firefox. I mean, how can firefox crash the whole system dead? If anything, it should crash itself but I should be able to kill it. Firefox must just be the catalyst in this problem, exploiting some kind of a bug.

BTW:
I8500, nvidia, Gentoo x86, dev-kernel-2.6.10, xfce, nptl.

sysXcep · Post by **sysXcep** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 11:30 am

RohanRNS Post

RohanRNS wrote:I have also experienced the strange freeze while randomly working in X.

#1) When I am running a cpu-intensive program, the laptop begins making a good amount of noise (due to fans starting), and the laptop carries out the process. But as soon as the cpu intensive process ends and I close the application, the laptop freezes. An example is playing a flash animation on a website using firefox, and then closing firefox. This repeatedly causes the laptop to hang.

#2) Firefox, for some bizarre reason, firefox spikes the cpu and causes the laptop to hang. I have no idea what causes this spike, they usually appear during causal browsing.

My laptop:
Dell 5160 Inspiron
p4 3.0ghz HT (ht is enabled in kernel config)

I'm stable now for several hours - but your observations might explain why.

The Theory

It's an SMT/HT problem. In other words we all have a P4 and:

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$ cat /usr/src/linux/.config|grep SMT          
CONFIG_SCHED_SMT=y

But we don't habe set up the march flag correctly. For example:

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$ cat /etc/make.conf|grep march
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=i686 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"

Additionally the firefox binaries seem not to be "SMT save". Whenever this technology is used by firefox (eg. CPU intensive flash games) the box locks up.

What I have done - or: the fix?

I set my march flag to:

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-march=pentium4

Then I compilied Firefox from source

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# emerge unmerge mozilla-firefox-bin
# emerge mozilla-firefox

I guess this way firefox is made "SMT save".

Can you acknowledge this?

Please compile a Kernel without SMT support an give your firefox another run. If it doesn't crash I'm right and you can reenable SMT and compile firefox with the correct march flag.

winston_nolan · Post by **winston_nolan** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 1:41 pm

i run amd and mine also freezes

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CFLAGS="-O2 -march=athlon-xp -fomit-frame-pointer"

it only freeze when im viewing a flash site - you also mentioned flash -
maybe thats a starting point?

later

RohanRNS · Post by **RohanRNS** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 2:52 pm

have tested it by turning off SMT in the kernel, and change march to pentium4. My wireless seems to go nutty (ndiswrapper errors all of the place) when I compile the kernel without SMT. But I compiled firefox and ran it on a fairly flash intensive site. Same freeze

sysXcep · Post by **sysXcep** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 3:00 pm

Please post a link to that site. I want to try it myself.

RohanRNS · Post by **RohanRNS** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 3:11 pm

www.newgrounds.com and just open a few tabs, it should start freezing.

Also this isn't only firefox, i just started my laptop a few min ago, and did nothing but start fluxbox and open gaim. POOF freeze.

Mozilla seems to do better however, if you visit the site with only mozilla, cpu usage seems to stay under 10%, and everything runs smoothly.

EDIT: also i cannot SSH into the frozen machine, some others can

sysXcep · Post by **sysXcep** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 4:18 pm

Sorry I cannot verify this. I started several flashgames at the same time - no crash. Perhaps recompiling xorg and fluxbox with the new flag would do the trick?

vola · Post by **vola** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 4:49 pm

winston_nolan wrote:i run amd and mine also freezes
Code: Select all
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=athlon-xp -fomit-frame-pointer"
it only freeze when im viewing a flash site - you also mentioned flash -
maybe thats a starting point?

later

Imho you have just set the wrong link for the flash plugin.

@sysXcep:
Thanks for that thread.
I also have a P4 and HT.

Look at my make.conf:
bahamut kai # cat /etc/make.conf | grep march
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer"

I have compiled the whole system with this flags and my system crashes minimum 5 times a day.
Have you an idea whats wrong here?

PS:
I don't use the binary version and firefox locks up at random.
Sorry for my english.

sysXcep · Post by **sysXcep** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 7:47 pm

OK, it's obviously not firefox itself - it triggers the freeze only. I compiled a new Kernel without SMT - let's wait and see...

@RohanRNS: Try to update/reinstall your flashplugin.

vola · Post by **vola** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 11:19 pm

Yes, it freezes also when I'm doing nothing.
I.e. my laptop freezes, while i'm afk.
(Black screen (its normal, i have no screensavers actived). Only restart works).

Oh I forgot: When im mouving the mouse, the screen activates but i cannot click anything.
This is the problem, I no... but I thought it's triggered by a click e.g.

Misteriously, very misteriously.

GeirBrandal · Post by **GeirBrandal** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 3:34 am

I recently switched motherboard and graphics card, from an nForce2 board and Radeon 9800, to a KT400 board and a GeForceFX 5200. After this change, Firefox freeze before it loads properly. If I SSH in, X has 99% of cpu, just as with you guys.

If I SSH onto another machine on my network and run firefox from there, I can surf for a long while without problems, but eventually it will freeze then as well. Opera seems to last a bit longer, but is still as unusable as firefox in the long run. I'm using links as i write.

Both the motherboard and the graphics card are stable as rocks otherwise, i.e. running Diablo II for hours.

Also, I use the exact same configuration as I did with my problem-free motherboard and graphics card. The only other difference since then is that I also installed my SB Live 5.1 audio card.

Bottom line, the change of hardware made my browsers freeze. All configs and settings are done the same way as before.

I don't know if that helps, or just makes things even more confusing.

Any luck solving it with any of you?

sysXcep · Post by **sysXcep** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 2:47 pm

Since I compiled my new Kernel without SMT I had no more crashes. Perhaps you can try this, too. This will decrease your performance of course, but not that much. If it's really SMT we can only wait for the new kernel...

supermihi · Post by **supermihi** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 5:15 pm

Before switching to gentoo, I experienced problems with firefox freezes, too (on a fedora 3 system). There were two kinds of freezes:
1) Complete hangups, if I remember correctly they also appered mainly when watching flash apps (or, more precisely, interacting with them, e.g. right click)

2) temporarily freezes - firefox hung up the whole system for a few seconds, and did that

Code: Select all

 really

often. It happened to the fedora 3 box of my girlfriend, too, so that may be a problem of the fedora 3 rpm package. I can't remember having any firefox problems with gentoo for now. Did you all update to 1.0.1?

sysXcep · Post by **sysXcep** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 5:37 pm

I am running the latest sourcecode-version. I think it's SMT...

vola · Post by **vola** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 8:46 pm

Hmm, I will probe linux 2.6.11 without the gentoo patches.
Will see if it works.

PS:
Oh, I didn't see your posting.
SMT... interesting. Thanks!

converter · Post by **converter** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 9:26 pm

From the Shot In The Dark Department:

Could Flash and Linux' dodgy (you know it's true) sound support be the culprit here? If you have an application that tries to play a lot of audio when the audio device is blocked it will eat up your resources and you won't be able to fork new processes, making the system unresponsive until the queued sound I/O requests are allowed to complete. If I remember correctly, Flash (stupidly) uses only esound. Do other esound apps (i.e. Gnome apps that use sound) work properly in the same system state context as firefox?

Useful tools for testing this theory: strace, lsof

Hint: if you're using ALSA and built your kernel with OSS emulation support, edit your ~/.asoundrc and run firefox from the aoss wrapper (emerge media-libs/alsa-oss). Works a charm.

vola · Post by **vola** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 9:27 pm

Ok, with the 2.6.11 kernel my keyboard doesn't work.

Will test your method.

converter: This problem has nothing to do with flash, imho.

But your right, i cannot listen to two sounds parallel.
And alsa reports errors when i shutdown or reboot my box.
But this is another problem.

vola · Post by **vola** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 12:46 am

Works since i have disabled smt.
Thanks!

Edit: No... freezed again.

GeirBrandal · Post by **GeirBrandal** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 8:05 pm

Last night, my computer froze while surfing with "links2 -g" as well. Although it lived much longer than Opera. Firefox still dies on startup, before the first website has loaded properly.

It must be something that these web browsers has in common, and it must be something basic, considering the rather minimalistic nature of links.

Remember, my machine still freeze while using firefox from another machine on my network over ssh, it just takes a while. Could the graphics rendering cause the freeze?

The random nature of the problem really confuse me.

vola · Post by **vola** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 11:44 pm

Hm.
I don't think that you have our problem.
It's definitely firefox. When I'm browsing with dillo e.g. all works fine.

You must have another problem, but then this is the wrong thread.

PS: Without SMT i still have freezes, but it is much better than before.

duckyhatezchat · Post by **duckyhatezchat** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 4:28 am

Mine also freezes, even if I updated it to 1.0.1. I'm on morph24 kernel. At first I thought ProxySwitch caused the freezes. Removing the extension indeed reduced the freezes (especially at startups), but it still freezes from time to time. Unplugging the network cable (or disabling eth0) sometimes un-freezes the firefox. I am still not sure what is causing those freezes.

vola · Post by **vola** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 8:09 pm

Does only your firefox freeze, or freeze your whole system?

vola · Post by **vola** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 9:11 pm

@sysXcep: Does everythink works without smt on your box now?

sysXcep · Post by **sysXcep** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 1:11 pm

Sorry, I was busy during the last few days...
But I'm pretty sure that my box is stable now!

Perhaps you've got another prolbem beside SMT?

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