1256062 - Crash during session restore loses session data

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Adam Nielsen]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:44.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/44.0
Build ID: 20160208220956

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open Firefox after a crash (due to a Linux kernel bug)
2. Press button to restore session
3. Firefox crashes again (due to same kernel bug)
4. Open Firefox again, session has been lost
5. Go into Firefox profile folder, recovery.js/.bak are empty (only showing one tab with home page), previous.js is from over a month ago and missing the latest tabs, and there is no backup of the last session to restore


Actual results:

The session was lost because Firefox crashed during the session restore process


Expected results:

Firefox should not wipe session data until the restored session has been fully restored, and when it does, it should keep the original sessionstore file as the backup in case the sudden surge in memory use (caused by restoring so many tabs) causes another crash.

Comment 1

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

That's not good.

* Was this a Firefox crash or a kernel panic?
* Do you have any custom settings in Preferences > Privacy > History?
* Could you check with recent Nightlies if the issue still arises? We have recently fixed a startup race condition that could possibly be related.

Comment 2

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

If we don't hear from the reporter in the next week or so, I'm going to close this one as INCOMPLETE.

Comment 3

[Adam Nielsen]

My apologies, it's a bit tricky to reproduce, it seems you have to get Firefox to crash at just the right moment.

To answer David's questions, the kernel killed Firefox due to OOM (Intel video driver memory leak, using up 15GB+ of memory on a 16GB system).  There are no custom settings in History, and I haven't had a chance to test with a nightly yet but I will and report back.  Has the nightly fix made it into a main release yet?

Part of the issue is that it takes 2-3 weeks for the system to get into a state where this bug can be reproduced relatively reliably, but then you can't do anything (like install another version of Firefox) with the system in this state.  So you have to restart X11, make your changes, then wait 2-3 weeks for the opportunity to test again.  So you only really get one opportunity to test per month...

Comment 4

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Hey Yoric - what fix were you referring to in comment 1? Do you have a bug number?

Comment 5

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Sorry, can't find it :/

Comment 6

[Monty Himself]

This just happened to me. I had Firefox opened and my system crashed (due to some kernel panic or something, it certainly wasn't Firefox causing its own crash). After restarting my system, the browser automatically opened again, showing the session restore tab. Then, the system crashed again and upon restarting another time, the browser opened, the session restore tab was displayed very briefly and then the tab crashed. Trying to restore the tab does not work.

I can reproduce this to some degree. If I have Firefox open, logout through my desktop environment (thereby effectively killing the browser) and login again, the browser opens up again fine and shows me all of the tabs I had opened, without the session restore prompt. If I then logout and login again, Firefox is opened and only shows me the crashed session restore tab this time. I am also not able to restore it by clicking on the button.

I am using Fedora 24 and Firefox 49.0.2.

Loosing my session was pretty annoying, so I hope this can be resolved. I can of course try to provide more information if needed.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Monty, can you still reproduce?

Comment 8

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

I will close this issue as incomplete because we cannot reproduce this issue on our end but if the issue still occurs we can reopen it with more information.