OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - General > Events

Firefox problem, was Re: IRC speakup with BWW this Saturday (3 of March)!

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Neil Waldhauer:
Well, I missed my chance to ask, but the question I would have asked is this:

What is going on with Firefox? As it stands, I can leave the browser pointed to a modern, active webpage, and after some time, the system will reset. I've been doing this long enough to recognize kernel corruption. Firefox runs the system out of some resource, and the kernel is not protected from such a shortage.

Having solved some of these problems in legacy industrial systems, I know they are challenging to solve. Is there any hope that a future version of Firefox will be more forgiving of system shortages?

Is the problem actually in Firefox?

Lars:
Are you sure it is a Firefox problem ?

Sometimes I have reboots if I just open the Master volume control (volume.exe). And I had it on other occasions starting applications. But I also had occasions where I would get a "page fault" exception in Ring 0 (for which I generated a system dump).
I think there is a fundamental flaw in some very basic system component. That could be the OS virtual memory manager. But it can also be DOSCALL1.DLL as that is used by about any process that is started.
I think the virtual memory manager is the more likely culprit. And it much looks like it is a serialization issue (access not properly serialized on updating memory structures etc.) as it only happens occasionally.
If you have Theseus: run "getws.exe" and watch your system reboot ...


Dave Yeo:
Mozilla definitely makes things worse, probably due to memory fragmentation and running out of certain types of memory.
I run both SeaMonkey and Thunderbird as I seem to be in charge of them. In eCS, after about 3 days of uptime, I'd open a tab or window and spontaneously reboot. ArcaOS doesn't do this, instead I get freezes, usually in text mode applications such as trying to run rsync to back stuff up, sometimes the desktop and often SM doesn't finish closing. Interestingly, while on dial up and using Injoy, Mozilla apps were continuously crashing on me with problems allocating JS memory. Retiring Injoy fixed that with 4 crashes in 3 months, all when querying the system about fonts.
Mozilla is just getting too big and 32bit Windows has lots of problems with OOM (out of memory) crashes that go away just by running 32 bit Firefox on 64 bit Windows. I understand that Chrome is even worse as it spawns more processes to sandbox various things, so moving to Chromium isn't a simple solution. Our platform is an old design and the designers probably never imagined running stuff like Firefox.

As for crashes when opening the volume control, I had that at one time with the work around that I could load the DOS driver for my sound card first by opening a DOS session and then no crash. Turned out to be a faulty CPU, or at least when I swapped my Cyrix 686 that had overheated a few times due to bad fans, with a real Pentium, the crashes went away as well as all the sys3075's I had with Netscape.

Lars:
I would love to believe that. However I also have these problems when I don't run Firefox at all.
But again, memory is the problem. When I run EPM.EXE and subsequently close it, I can observe that it leaves an endless sequence of memory "holes" in upper shared memory. That is due to the fact that the DLL that it loads (ETKE603.DLL) specifies trillions of small memory objects (it contains 234 memory objects: who compiled and linked that stuff ?). And for each memory object, 64 kByte of memory is allocated (even though they are considerably smaller).
When EPM is closed the DLL is unloaded but the fragmentation remains.

roberto:
Well, I recently had problems with firefox 38.8.0, and now firefox 45.5.0 works much better
Lately I have had many errors in the popuplog.os2
It gives me the feeling that if the initial start is good, it does not give me any error. Everything is perfect today.
 The question is how to know if the boot is good.?
Even the error of videos that made me turn off and turn on the Wi-Fi constantly disappeared.
saludos

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