flash viewer under 64 bit gutsy/firefox goes zombie

[Josh Scholar]

Binary package hint: firefox

Using the 64 bit AMD Gutsy and firefox 2.0.0.11, and flash-plugin-nonfree 9.0.115ubuntu0.7.10

The flash plugin has recently become unstable. I'm not sure what happened, maybe one of the updates broke something.
But the way it is now, firefox works on pages with flash animations for a while, 5 minutes to 15 minutes - then the flash animations go blank and the system monitor show "npviewer" as a "Zombie" process.

On a couple occasions, npviewer died in a different way where it was taking 100% of the processor time and I had to kill it myself to make the machine responsive. And on one of those occasions it obviously died while firefox was waiting for it, and firefox blocked with 0 CPU usage - the other time firefox kept working.

If I kill firefox and npviewer and restart it, that usually works for a while. I think I have to specifically kill npviewer - I ended up with a whole bunch of npviewer processes when I didn't.

[Josh Scholar (joshscholar)]

The problem may be you-tube related, since most of the flash I had going was youtube.

That may also explain why it just started happening - youtube changes their player often, and tries out altered versions for short periods of time.

It may be that they have a new version that crashes... I've had a youtube page up all day, and though it crashed a couple times in the morning, it has been running for hours now without a further crash - youtube may have changed back.

[daponz (daponz)]

same here

[shclim (shclim)]

I have the same problem

[Tom Dillig (tdillig)]

I can confirm flash being extremely unstable since 1/18 up to (and including) today. Problem is definitely not limited to YourTube - nytimes.com ads suddenly crash flash as well.

[Jake Harr (jakar)]

I encountered this as well, and it seems to be a recent problem. At times, it will produce an image full of random-looking data before crashing, hanging, or just not working. This happens frequently in Google Reader. Taking a wild guess, it looks like flash is reading from memory outside of whatever array it is supposed to be using.

[peddy (peddy22)]

Happening to me for all kinds of websites. However I do not get gibberish, just a grey box and an empty space sometimes. This seems to be a big problem, affecting all 64 bit FF users. I hope its resolved soon.

[Jake Harr (jakar)]

Just to clarify, the problem for me is usually the grey box that peddy talks about. The gibberish is rare and happens most often with videos embedded in Google Reader for some reason. That could be a different problem entirely. However, if garbage data does appear for a video, then grey empty boxes show up in place of subsequent flash instances until I restart firefox. The empty spaces can, and generally do, occur without the mangled video appearing first.

[Chris MacDonald (chris-fourthandvine)]

Just confirming the problem...

I have an amd64 build and it seems as though Flash crashes randomly; I haven't yet been able to figure out what usage pattern causes it. I've had it crash on YouTube but I've also had it crash simply showing advertisements at any number of websites. When it crashes the contents of the rendered Flash object turn gray (on all tabs) and Firefox needs to be restarted before it will display Flash again. When it crashes I get a log entries like the ones here:

Feb 20 12:37:58 jalapeno kernel: [387193.844063] npviewer.bin[20250]: segfault at 0000000000000010 rip 00000000f7ac0ad4 rsp 00000000f4a70cd0 error 4

I've got Firefox 2.0.0.12+2nobinonly+2-0ubuntu0.7.10 and flashplugin-nonfree 9.0.115.0ubuntu2. If I can be of any further assistance for logs or testing patches, let me know.

[peddy (peddy22)]

Bug affects all known 64-bit users using the newer version of Flash Player with the latest version of firefox.

[peddy (peddy22)]

Bug affects all known 64-bit users using the newer version of Flash Player with the latest version of firefox.

[peddy (peddy22)]

Last 2 comments by me were for Firefox and Flash respectively :P

[Dara Adib (daradib)]

Marking as a duplicate of Bug 177856.

This bug should only affect 64-bit SMP/SMT machines (i.e. multicore, multiprocessor, including presumably Intel HyperThreading).

The nspluginwrapper author has provided a patch: http://launchpadlibrarian.net/11055616/npw.gthreads.diff

And Rashad Tatum built a fixed package: http://launchpadlibrarian.net/11224902/nspluginwrapper_0.9.91.5-1ubuntu2_amd64.deb

Thanks Riccardo Pellegrini and nspluginwrapper author.

[Chris MacDonald (chris-fourthandvine)]

Installed the fixed package and things seem to be working again.

Thanks!

[RATM355 (ratm355)]

installing the new nspluginwrapper package fixed about all of the problems for me. Here is one website that doesn't work that used to with the older flash plugin:

dredg.com

Seems to me an easier fix for all this would be for people to stop making 100% Flash websites, but that's just me......

[Rashad Tatum (rmtatum)]

dredg.com seems to be working fine for me.

On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 10:25 PM, RATM355 <email address hidden> wrote:

> *** This bug is a duplicate of bug 177856 ***
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/177856
>
> installing the new nspluginwrapper package fixed about all of the
> problems for me. Here is one website that doesn't work that used to with
> the older flash plugin:
>
> dredg.com
>
> Seems to me an easier fix for all this would be for people to stop
> making 100% Flash websites, but that's just me......
>
> --
> flash viewer under 64 bit gutsy/firefox goes zombie
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/184157
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug (via bug 177856).
>

--
Rashad Tatum
---------
"[W]e shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides
over the destinies of Nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our
battles for us. The battle, Sir, is not to the strong alone. It is to the
vigilant, the active, the brave." - Patrick Henry on the fight for
independence

"The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in
Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating
no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people."
Freedom Under Siege, 1987 by Ron Paul

"I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than
standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by
posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large
scale. " - Thomas Jefferson

[RATM355 (ratm355)]

weird....I'm getting a grayish-green background with just a white box where all the Flash animations should be. I just tried rebooting my computer and opening up Firefox again and that didn't help.

[RATM355 (ratm355)]

correction to my above post.....

my problem was with Java and not Flash with dredg.com. After I added these repositories and upgraded my packages, everything works great:

deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/ubuntu/ gutsy/
deb-src http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/ubuntu/ gutsy/

Thanks everybody.