ff hangs after longer period of inactivity. seems to intermittently stop working

[vetdoc]

Binary package hint: firefox

v 2.0.0.4

especially when using tabbed browsing ff seems to hang after longer period of inactivity (when I pause working and let ff as it is not closing window). much worse when using my usb wlan stick (11 mbit rate only), but also using ethernet cable. using murrina theme with ubuntu feisty on a fujitsu siemens laptop with 512 mb ram and 1.5 ghz processor. have to close window by force then reopen it to get it working again. quite annoying behaviour ...

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Jun 18 14:17:39 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.04
Package: firefox 2.0.0.4+1-0ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: i386
SourcePackage: firefox
Uname: Linux RAUPI 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Thu Jun 7 20:19:32 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Thank you for filing this bug with us,
Can you please give step by step instructions oh how to reproduce?
Are you using desktop-effects(compiz or beryl) If so can you please disable it from starting when logging in and log out and back in without them enabled and see if you can than reproduce.

[vetdoc (m-rihm)]

I don't use desktop-effects, only the murrina theme. Normally, the behaviour occurs using my WLAN USB stick (Zyxel ZyAir g-220 with Feisty driver) when opening a new tab and there a site with many effects (e.g. the German page www.web.de). During log in to my e-mail account at web.de (SSL) it takes very long to finally log in, and every move within the mail account takes very long. The 2nd situation is when I am away leaving the laptop running (no energy saving tool) with finally the screensaver switching on. After a while, when reactivating (mostly to look something up in google - I had to learn for an exam) FF seems to hang immediately after opening a webpage (FF was on during inactivity, but it occurs also when re-opening FF after closing it completely). I don't know if this description is useful for you, I hope so.

Thank you!

[Ariel Faigon (ariel.faigon)]

So many reports on firefox hanging, I'm not sure if this is the one I should pick to add to.

The reason I picked it is that it seems most similar to what I see, and I don't want to open yet another bug.
But really, I'm not 100% sure if this is the same bug.

Kubuntu version:
Gutsy (7.10) with all latest updates applied as of Dec 9, 2007

Firefox version:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071204 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.11

Symptom:
Firefox hangs (busy cursor) after a long time of inactivity.

It happens of different websites when I leave the browser on them overnight.
I come in the morning and the browser is hung.
example: http://www.peterpaulandmary.com/coffeehouse/coffeehouse1.html

Nothing I tried can get it out of this state, clicking on 'stop' button grays out the stop button, but any new web site I enter gives the same result: firefox is busy spinning but never actually loads the page. Firefox seems to be responsive to key and button presses, but is unable to fetch any content anymore.

Digging deeper:
Firefox is in some high-speed infinite loop (strace looks like this)
gettimeofday({1197227920, 392372}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1197227920, 392489}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1197227920, 392628}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1197227920, 392742}, NULL) = 0
read(7, "\372", 1) = 1
ioctl(3, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0
poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=18, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=19, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=20, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=49, events=POLLIN}], 7, 0) = 0
write(3, "5\30\4\0\304\317\232\1c\0\0\0\30\0\30\0F\377\5\0\304\317"..., 312) = 312
ioctl(3, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0
poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=18, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=19, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=20, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=49, events=POLLIN}, {fd=7, events=POLLIN, revents=POLLIN}], 8, -1) = 1
gettimeofday({1197227920, 398373}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1197227920, 398489}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1197227920, 398609}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1197227920, 398722}, NULL) = 0
read(7, "\372", 1) = 1
ioctl(3, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0
poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=18, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=19, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=20, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=49, events=POLLIN}, {fd=7, events=POLLIN, revents=POLLIN}], 8, -1) = 1
gettimeofday({1197227920, 442397}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1197227920, 442515}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1197227920, 442654}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1197227920, 442768}, NULL) = 0
read(7, "\372", 1) = 1
ioctl(3, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0
poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=18, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=19, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=20, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=49, events=POLLIN}], 7, 0) = 0
write(3, "5\30\4\0\306\317\232\1c\0\0\0\30\0\30\0F\377\5\0\306\317"..., 300) = 300
ioctl(3, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0
poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=PO...

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

Hi,

firefox extensions are the cause for the majority of bugs reported against firefox.

To check that the bug you are seeing is actually a firefox one (and not an extension one), please disable your extensions one-by-one (restart firefox in between) until there is either no enabled extension left or your problem is resolved.

Please report your findings back.

Thanks,
 - Alexander

[vetdoc (m-rihm)]

Update to my first posting: Fortunately, I don't have problems any longer since I upgraded to Gutsy. There, I am using extensions as well with no problems. I am sorry I wasn't much of a help in bug finding, I am afraid... maybe it was the WLAN USB stick, I used. Because I replaced it with a Siemens Gigaset PC Card 300 (300 Mbit/s Wireless LAN Cardbus Card IEEE 802.11n Draft Standard) which was not supported yet, but nevertheless works like a charm. Only the "Link/Act" and "Power" LEDs don't work, but I don't need them. FYI, it has an Atheros chip and works with the Madwifi driver (the newest, if I remember correctly). Quite nice!
Thanks for your help!

vetdoc

[Ariel Faigon (ariel.faigon)]

I'm able to reproduce one instance of firefox hanging without any extension.

Note however that this particular hang is different than the above.
Hopefully, it will give developers an easy way to reproduce one hang condition.

Steps to reproduce:
--------------------------
To ensure no extensions are used I start firefox in safe mode from a shell:

    $ firefox -safe-mode

Now go to youtube.com
- Start clicking on videos at random, it doesn't matter which.
- Alternate between clicking on new videos and clicking the back button to go to previous videos.
- Click regardless of the state of the video playback. interrupting playing videos in the middle

After less than one minute (about 10-30 clicks on average) of going through this exercise
I'm able to get to a state where firefox is hung and stops responding to user input.

strace on the most recent firefox-bin process shows this:

    $ strace -p 1920
    Process 1920 attached - interrupt to quit
    futex(0xae575bd8, FUTEX_WAIT, 3076, NULL

This is 100% reproducible in my env, and it is without any extensions I can see.
Unless you count the youtube flash-video plugin as an extension.

Does this help?

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 04:30:14AM -0000, Ariel Faigon wrote:
> This is 100% reproducible in my env, and it is without any extensions I can see.
> Unless you count the youtube flash-video plugin as an extension.
>
> Does this help?
>

are you running gutsy? ... how did you install the flash plugin?

 - Alexander

[Ariel Faigon (ariel.faigon)]

Hi Alexander,

> Are you running gutsy? ... how did you install the flash plugin?

Yes, running gutsy.

Based on lsof -p <pid> of the running firefox-bin process, the loaded flashplayer is this:

   -rwxr-xr-x 1 ariel ariel 8019524 Aug 24 08:28 .mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

under my home dir.

It comes directly from adobe/macromedia, not via gutsy.

According to:
            http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/about/
the running flashplayer version is:
             9.0.60.184

I guess it is time to upgrade to the latest again (though what I have is pretty new)

I really appreciate your looking into this and asking great questions :)

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 05:16:47PM -0000, Ariel Faigon wrote:
> Hi Alexander,
>
> > Are you running gutsy? ... how did you install the flash plugin?
>
> Yes, running gutsy.
>
> Based on lsof -p <pid> of the running firefox-bin process, the loaded
> flashplayer is this:
>
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 ariel ariel 8019524 Aug 24 08:28
> .mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

please remove that and install the flashplugin-nonfree package. Maybe
it helps for you.

 - Alexander

[Ariel Faigon (ariel.faigon)]

Long time has passed. Just to bring some closure. I'm no longer running gutsy. In Hardy + firefox 3.x things were really stable.

Now with the upgrade to Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10) different firefox (extensions) stability issues have been showing.
In particular I've seen many crashes which stopped happening once I switched from the flashplugin-nonfree package to the latest official debian package from Adobe.

Anyway, I no longer experience the hangs I used to frequently experience on gusty.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Closed bug due to last comment