1225501 - Firefox replaced many (not all) opened tabs as new tabs, after firefox hung with high CPU then restart

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Germano Massullo (Thetra)]

Attachment: Firefox.jpeg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/42.0
Build ID: 20151102093730

Steps to reproduce:

I closed Firefox due an high CPU usage. When I restarted it, many opened tabs have been replaced with "new tab" collection of tabs. See screenshot.
For people "try with a new profile": since it is not a bug that happens often, sorry I am not able to try without extensions, with new profiles, etc.
~6 months ago I experienced the same bug on another machine.

My machine: Fedora 23 KDE

Comment 1

[YF (Yang)]

Maybe dupe of bug 610357.

Comment 2

[Carl]

After upgrading from 43.0.1 to 43.0.3 I've run into the same problem as Germano, although I cannot be certain whether the problem predates that upgrade. I use the Session Manager (SM) extension. I can see in the SM save dialog that if I save the session, some of my tabs will be saved with the correct favicon but a tab title and tab URL of about:blank instead of the actual title and URL. If I follow through and do a save and then restore, then I do indeed lose those tabs. Upon restoration, they will appear either as a New Tab or about:blank. There seems to be no way to recover the lost tabs.

I suspect the problem has nothing to do with the SM extension because I have been able to use the built-in Web Developer Scratchpad (and its Pretty Print feature) to open sessionstore-backups\recovery.js and find open tab 'entries' with only a single 'url' set to "about:newtab" and an 'image' URL matching the favicon for the tabs I lost.

I am also using the Tab Mix Plus (TMP) extension. It has a Duplicate Tab function to duplicate open tabs. If I use this on a tab which the SM's save dialog shows me will be replaced with about:blank, then the newly created tab is NOT a duplicate nor is it about:blank. Instead I just get an empty New Tab. The TMP Duplicate Tab function still works on all other open tabs though.

I am currently sitting here with a large number of important tabs open and afraid to exit Firefox because there's no obvious logic as to which tabs will be irretrievably lost. The session restore feature and/or internal tab state for Firefox seems to be critically broken.

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0
Extensions: Session Manager 0.8.1.8, Tab Mix Plus 0.4.2.0

Comment 3

[Carl]

One of the tabs I currently have open that Session Manager (SM) showed me would get nuked with about:blank if I save the current session is this one:

  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-manager/reviews/

As in my previous comment, I cannot duplicate this tab with Tab Mix Plus (TMP). Yet more interesting is that manually opening a new tab and entering that same URL also results in a tab that cannot be duplicated. I now have four identical tabs with that URL successfully manually opened, including the original. Here's where it gets stranger. SM's save dialog now tells me that the original tab (#1) will no longer be nuked with about:blank, nor will tab #3, but tabs #2 and #4 will get nuked with about:newtab instead of about:blank. Keep in mind that TMP is still telling me that none of the four can be duplicated.

I should note that the session restore feature built in to TMP is disabled in favour of SM.

If I didn't have a lot of other open tabs I can't afford to lose, I'd restart Firefox to see whether that particular URL is magic.

Comment 4

[Elhem Enohpi]

Carl, I think what you are describing is a bug that started with Firefox 43, and so is a different issue than the one reported here. Please see bug 1238178, and see if any of it applies to you.

That bug seems to be related to specific web page URLs, and having cookies disabled.

Could you please confirm (maybe in the comments for that bug, rather than this one) whether you have cookies enabled or not?  

If you're worried about losing open tabs, you could try enabling cookies and reloading all the tabs, before quitting. As a temporary workaround for the problem, you could enable first-party session cookies for all sites (and perhaps install the Self-Destructing Cookies addon), or revert to Firefox 42.

Comment 5

[Carl]

I've responded to Elhem's request in bug #1238178, but it is not yet obvious to me that these two bugs are unrelated.

For the record, although I noticed the problem after upgrading from 43.0.1 to 43.0.3, I cannot say for sure that it was or wasn't present prior to my upgrade.

Comment 6

[Elhem Enohpi]

Thanks. I'm fairly certain that if you test with Firefox 42, you'll find that the problem you describe is not present, and with 43.0, it is.

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/42.0/
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/43.0/

If that's the case, it might be a good idea to open a new bug with your issue, and note that it's related to some tabs and not others, and to disabled cookies.

This bug, which seems to be about a one-time failure of all tabs to be restored after a crash in Firefox 42, is less likely to be resolved since the reporter can't reproduce or test it.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Germano Massullo from comment #0)
> Created attachment 8688477 [details]
> Firefox.jpeg
> 
> User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101
> Firefox/42.0
> Build ID: 20151102093730
> 
> Steps to reproduce:
> 
> I closed Firefox due an high CPU usage. When I restarted it, many opened
> tabs have been replaced with "new tab" collection of tabs. See screenshot.
> For people "try with a new profile": since it is not a bug that happens
> often, sorry I am not able to try without extensions, with new profiles, etc.
> ~6 months ago I experienced the same bug on another machine.

Germano,
Did that occasion also involve high CPU or other Firefox problem that caused you to restart it??

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Germano, 

What addons do you have installed?

Comment 9

[Germano Massullo (Thetra)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, NI for questions) from comment #8)
> Germano, 
> 
> What addons do you have installed?

The only active extensions are
UBlock origin
Tabby2

Comment 10

[reikred]

This bug has affected me for months if not years, and still exists in FF 51.0.1 64b/linux. I'll try to attach a screenshot or two. My observations are as follows:

1. occurs upon restart of FF, especially one that has many tabs

2. yes, most often occurs after high cpu and/or memory usage, followed by exit and restart

3. may be related to maxing out, then clearing, the disk cache, when using Override, in about:preferences#advanced

Override automatic cache management
Limit cache to (750) MB of disk space

In fact, the high cpu and memory usage appear to occur exactly when the cache usage is at the limit (from "top"):
 
  3582 xyzuser      20   0 11.454g 5.236g 289.4m R 116.5 16.7 484:34.56 /usr/local/firefox-51.0.1/firefox

Note, 5.2GB of resident memory is pretty normal for me, but the 11.5GB virtual is inflated above a normal of about, say 6-8GB  virtual when ~5GB physical.

4. as can be seen on screenshot (if I succeed), if you select one of the "New Tab", it will bring up the proper page, but since I have so many tabs I would like NOT to do that or else chew up a lot of memory in the process. The screenshots are from one window out of maybe 10. Not all windows are affected, and not all windows have all tabs affected. Often the first few tabs are ok, then the rest appear as "New Tab".

5. appears more likely to happen if machine/cpu is otherwise heavily loaded at the same time as the restart, for example, if I restart multiple firefox instances nearly at the same time. Yes, I am a power user!


Overall, I would say it is related to cache clearing, and bug that FF is thrashing when the disk cache is maxed out.

Comment 11

[reikred]

I could not figure out how to attach images so here are links instead


http://i68.tinypic.com/i5dgr8.jpg
http://i68.tinypic.com/zuhvmt.jpg

Comment 12

[reikred]

Attachment: New Tab should have content

Comment 13

[reikred]

Attachment: New tab when visited is actually not empty, it was just a missing title

Comment 14

[reikred]

So the problem is that the New Tab tabs do not contain a "title".

This also means the only way to find a specific tab is to visit every faulty "New Tab" tab so that the title will appear. That will use truckloads of memory,and take lots of time, both cpu and human. I usually use the TabHunter extension to find specific tabs I want to revisit, and that will not work either, of course, until all tabs have been visited and get a title/name.

Comment 15

[Mark]

I've had this problem for perhaps over a year as well. But, in lieu of having a real solution, here is a workaround I've used for those times when I have many tabs in multiple windows and do NOT want to lose them.

1.  Select ALL the tabs on a particular window and right-click select "Reload Selected Tabs". This can take quite some time, but you can open a new window and using Session Manager, click on Session Manager/Save Session, which will pop up all the present windows and tabs (as mentioned above by someone), because Session Manager will show you those tabs that display "about:blank", which are the tabs which will appear blank if you close and reopen FireFox. So, then, you can step through each window and repeat the process of reloading all the tabs until you run out of tabs to reload. This can take quite a bit of time.

2. THEN you can SAVE your session and all the tabs will reopen perfectly when you reopen FireFox.

  This seems to point to some sort of loss of information either along the way - a "time-out" of sorts where the tab information is lost and disappears from the reload que.

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Germano, do you still see this when using a newer version?

Comment 17

[Germano Massullo (Thetra)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #16)

Germano, do you still see this when using a newer version?

This bug happens really rarely. I am not able to reproduce it at the moment

Comment 18

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for the update. Please reopen if you see this again.