browsers shutting down

[David Kiley]

When running both seamonkey 2.42.9 and firefox 45.9, they both crash and shut down fairly regularly when browsing. (the browser just shuts down and the task disappears from the task-bar.)
Restarting the program and all is normal again - but it's fairly annoying.

I'm just wondering if that is normal these days for other people too, or is there something about my setup that is not right?

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Hi David,

While not exactly a matching combination to yours, I do have Thunderbird 45.8.0 and Firefox 45.9.0 running side-by-side all day long, day after day.

It is usually Firefox that is the first one to exhaust all available memory and therefore needing a re-start. Normally this happens once I see over 1Gig of memory use in Theseus. A tell-tale sign is that page rendeing in Firefox ends up slowing down until it is just faster to re-start and be back up to speed.

So here is what has brought a good amount of stability to my system: AOS 202 SMP kernel. I'm not saying this is the "super fix", but I will describe the BEFORE & AFTER situation.

Just for the record I am running a Warp4 CP2 SMP box here, this is not a AOS install, rather a progressively updated installation. As you can imagine there are some warts and uglies with this approach, so certainly not as slick as a clean AOS install. I am also using the YUM/RPM system.

Further on, both FF and TB DLLs are marked to load-high using 'C'ode only option.

BEFORE
=====
1) I used to pre-load the FF and TB DLLs during system boot
2) This prevented the excessive memory consumption when FF or TB would be re-started without a complete system re-boot
- following about 2-3 days of such re-starts enough memory would be leaked/fragmented that re-starting FF would no longer recover to a usable state

AFTER
====
1) deployed the AOS 202 SMP kernel (update from 201), one of the key fixes there was the quashing of the bug which prevented previously loaded DLLs from be successfully un-loaded (and therefore memory released) when not in use
2) I no longer pre-load the FF and TB DLLs during system boot
2) The applications run reliably for about 5-7 days before the shared memory is so fragmented that no other apps can function because a sufficiently large consecutive chunk of memory can no longer be allocated
- this situation requires a re-boot

What is your configuration?

[Ian B Manners]

Hi David,

I can only speak for David's build of Firefox, which is rock solid here, the only addon I use is NoScript.

If you are still experiencing problems with a fresh profile, the next place I would look are what DLL types are you using, 386, 686 etc, and what build are are you using of the Mozilla products. Dont mix different CPU types between the Mozilla builds and the installed support DLL's.

firefox-45.9.0.en.US.os2.SUa2.PhenomII.zip
firefox-45.9.0.en-us.os2-pentium-m-9.9.2-08112020.zip
firefox-45.9.0.en-us.os2-i686-9.9.2-08112020.zip
and/or
seamonkey-2.42.9esr.en-us.os2.pentium-m-sua2r1.zip
seamonkey-2.42.9esr.en-us.os2-pentium-m-9.9.212112020.zip
seamonkey-2.42.9esr.en-us.os2-i686-15112020.zip

[Dave Yeo]

Hi David, I guess you are using the NSPR4 and NSS packages from Netlabs-exp. This is a known issue with those versions. Its a weird problem that we can't figure out, especially since the browser just vanishes without a trace.
Fix is to downgrade those packages, not easy and needs to be done on the cmd line (unless the newer ANPM has fixes for downgrading multiple packages).
Another fix, that I haven't tested, but should work would be to have the Netlabs-rel versions of those packages in the programs directory or elsewhere and use BEGINLIBPATH and LIBPATHSTRICT to make sure you are loading the older versions.

[Neil Waldhauer]

Some websites work OK, some eventually make the browser or the operating system to hang or crash, some crash the browser instantly.

Facebook works again because it correctly identifies Firefox 45 as unsupported. I wish other websites would do that.

When we were supported, going to Facebook and scrolling down would crash in many entertaining ways.

I used to use NoScript, but I stopped when it didn't help any more. Maybe it helps again; I haven't tried it. Others use a massive hosts file pointing to nothing; I haven't tried that either. Can someone point to current sources for those two options? Thanks.

[Dave Yeo]

Yea, half the problem is the JavaScript ran in some commercials, they can also be a security risk. The hosts file I use is from https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/releases. Need to extract the hosts file and replace the stock one in x:\mptn\etc., pasting in anything needed from the old one at close to the top of the file.
NoScript lives at https://noscript.net/, you will probably have to poke around to find the legacy add-on.
edit, typo fix

[Ian B Manners]

NoScript lives at https://noscript.net/, you will probably have to poke around to find the legacy add-on.
edit, typo fix

Legacy NoScript can also be found at:
http://www.os2site.com/sw/internet/mozilla/firefox/

[Remy]

When running both seamonkey 2.42.9 and firefox 45.9, they both crash and shut down fairly regularly when browsing. (the browser just shuts down and the task disappears from the task-bar.)
Restarting the program and all is normal again - but it's fairly annoying.

I'm just wondering if that is normal these days for other people too, or is there something about my setup that is not right?

Do you have tral file under your firefox path ?
(I've similar issue and it provides trap files)

[David Kiley]

Hi David, I guess you are using the NSPR4 and NSS packages from Netlabs-exp. This is a known issue with those versions. Its a weird problem that we can't figure out, especially since the browser just vanishes without a trace.
Fix is to downgrade those packages, not easy and needs to be done on the cmd line (unless the newer ANPM has fixes for downgrading multiple packages).
Another fix, that I haven't tested, but should work would be to have the Netlabs-rel versions of those packages in the programs directory or elsewhere and use BEGINLIBPATH and LIBPATHSTRICT to make sure you are loading the older versions.

Hi Dave,
I'm using the firefox that came installed with arcaos 5.06, and then I installed seamonkey-2.42.en-US.os2-i686-15112020.zip (following the yum package requirements in the text file for seamonkey) as well as libvpx-legacy-4.
Not sure if doing those changes would have installed those exp packages or not.

I was planning to reinstall my arcaos installation anyways so I will be curious to know if it happens with just firefox on a plain install.. IE is it something i'm doing while installing seamonkey.

[David Kiley]

Some websites work OK, some eventually make the browser or the operating system to hang or crash, some crash the browser instantly.

It usually is the more involved sites, like news sites, that seem to crash and burn the browser. If I browse with abandon it seems to happen about every 10-15 minutes when i'm busy. If I stay on just os2world it seems to be A-OK though !

Have not tried the noscript plugins yet - maybe worth a try next.

So it sounds like it is a bit normal at this point, from your description. I wonder how things will work with the new otter browser, when it comes out. Keeping my fingers crossed.

[Dave Yeo]

OK, it sounds like I was wrong about you using Netlabs-exp. As Remy asked, is there any trp files in the program directories? Also did you install the turbo programs? Without them, you will quickly run out of lower memory and get symptoms like you describe.
Running SM and FF together should be fine. For the mozturbo programs, go to Programs--Installed Software-->SeaMonkey (or Firefox)-->SMturbo Install (or FFturbo Install). This will mark the DLLs to load high, which is really needed, and preload tthe DLLs which won't hurt and was needed up to the last kernel release.