f8: PC dies while using firefox

[Manish Kathuria]

On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 09:38 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 19:21 +0530, Manish Kathuria wrote:
> > 
> > On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 07:04 -0500, Renich Bon Ciric wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > > 
> > > I've been experiencing, lately, some total freezes. The computer just
> > > dies:
> > > - The mouse won't respond.
> > > - The keyboard won't respond.
> > > - X can't be restarted
> > > 
> > > The only option is to hard-reset. Once done, firefox looses most of it's
> > > configuration options and sessions. It doesn't loose field history,
> > > history and bookmarks.
> > > 
> > > I have the following addons:
> > > 
> > > - Google sync
> > > - Google toolbar
> > > - Google notebook
> > > - Facebook toolbar.
> > > 
> > > I've experienced problems even without these. Tried removing flash with
> > > no luck...
> > > 
> > > Anybody experiencing the same problems? Any idea of what's the problem?
> > > 
> > 
> > Okay a similar thing has happened with me twice recently. I left my
> > laptop running F8 ( 2.6.24.4-64.fc8 x86_64 kernel)  on with Firefox,
> > with multiple sites opened, Evolution and maybe some small applications
> > like a xterm. When I came back after 4-5 hours, I found that the system
> > was frozen and I could not access it either through the GUI where I was
> > working or through any of the consoles. None of the keys or key
> > combinations were working. I could ping it from the other system but
> > could not access it through SSH also and was forced to switch off the
> > power and reboot it.
> > 
> > In the both the instances, after rebooting the system I examined the
> > system monitoring graphs I generate using a program called systemgraph
> > and discovered that over a 3 hour period:
> > 
> > 1. The physical memory used increased to 2414 MB out of a total of 2508
> > MB (as shown by free command). I have 2.5 GB of RAM installed.
> > 
> > 2. The swap used had increased to 1999.32 MB against the available swap
> > space of 2047MB.
> > 
> > 3. The CPU context switches had increased to a maximum of about 54,000
> > per second as compared to the average of about 4500-5000. Similarly the
> > pages in and out had increased to about 1700 and 2300 per second against
> > the average values between 20-30 per second.
> > 
> > 4. The disk I/O also showed a 100 times increase and the load average
> > also increased manifold
> > 
> > 5. However, there was no significant change in number of processes or
> > number of open files.
> > 
> > I tried to find out if there was any data regarding resource utilization
> > by various processes during this period but could not find any and
> > therefore I was unable to pinpoint the cause and was suspecting some
> > kernel bug. But looking at your mail, I think it could be firefox which
> > is causing the problem. However, no idea why. Maybe someone can explain
> > this.
> 
> Which version of Firefox are you using? FF2 has known memory leak
> problems (in my case it would simply crash after a few days). FF3 seems
> much more stable.
> 
> poc
> 

firefox-2.0.0.13-1.fc8

Another thing, this problem has occurred twice only when the system was
left unattended for some hours.


--
Manish