1779637 - Scroll options cause browser crashes

Reporter

Description

•

3 years ago

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0

Steps to reproduce:

Well, my browser was crashing a lot, and, eventually, just going through a bunch of settings, I disabled auto scrolling and smooth scrolling.

Actual results:

Once I disabled these two settings, not only did the browser crashes stop, but my computer also stopped having memory management blue screens.

Expected results:

Logically, nothing should have happened. Scrolling options should not be causing browser crashes and blue screens. And yet, when I turned auto scrolling and smooth scrolling off, the browser was suddenly working just fine.

So, if I may, please roll those features back to beta features until they stop causing serious memory problems.

BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]

Comment 1

•

3 years ago

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Panning and Zooming' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Component: Untriaged → Panning and Zooming

Product: Firefox → Core

Hiroyuki Ikezoe (:hiro)

Comment 2

•

3 years ago

I am sorry to hear that.

racecarlock, can you please post crash ids? You can find them in about:crashes. Thanks!

Flags: needinfo?(racecarlock)

racecarlock

Reporter

Comment 3

•

3 years ago

If you insist.

I will repeat that with smooth scroll and auto scroll disabled, this stuff has completely stopped happening.

Flags: needinfo?(racecarlock)

Hiroyuki Ikezoe (:hiro)

Comment 4

•

3 years ago

racecarlock, thanks for the crash ids. To me there's nothing related to auto scrolling or smooth scrolling either oddly. Does the crash happen again if you enable both prefs?

Flags: needinfo?(racecarlock)

Timothy Nikkel (:tnikkel)

Comment 5

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3 years ago

Do you still get the crashes if you try in a fresh profile?

Steve Fink [:sfink] [:s:]

Comment 6

•

3 years ago

First, I haven't heard of anyone else running into similar issues with those preferences enabled. Nor have a seen an unusual number of crashes in the GC. Those point me to something specific to your setup.

The crashes are happening in a wide variety of places. I see a couple in destructors like ~nsDOMMutationRecord, a few general GC or CC crashes that usually just mean there's heap corruption somewhere from something, and a couple in more specific places like mozilla::storage::Row::GetResultByName. Usually a wide variety means bad RAM, and I would strongly recommend running a memory tester even though it goes away if you disable those prefs. Prefs normally don't make much of a difference if you have bad RAM. I can only speculate that it changes the amount of heat generated or something?

DropboxExt64.52.0.dll showed up in one of the crashes I looked at, but only one, so it's probably not worth worrying about.

I think the best next steps are checking whether it happens in a fresh profile and running a memory tester. Also, it would be good to know whether it requires both prefs to be enabled, and if not, which one triggers this.

racecarlock

Reporter

Comment 7

•

3 years ago

Bad ram, huh? Yeah, other errors I've gotten point to that too.

So, I turned the options back on and so far, no problems. Which means I might have to replace my ram chips. However, I still don't consider it entirely coincidental that turning these options off lessened the error rate. But, maybe that's just because replacing my ram chips is going to be costly and will probably suck. It's only been 2 years and I had best buy help me pick parts and I had the geek squad help build it to avoid problems like this.

However, I don't think this entirely means there aren't problems on the browser's end to check out. For example, webroot's system analyzer (before webroot was uninstalled in a PC reset) detected memory leaks in the browser too. And there are massive I/O spikes on process explorer as well as massive lag moments whenever the browser syncs. But I suppose those would be considered separate issues from this one.

In conclusion, I might need to replace some stuff, but that doesn't mean the browser is off the hook entirely.

Flags: needinfo?(racecarlock)

Hiroyuki Ikezoe (:hiro)

Comment 8

•

3 years ago

Okay, given the with re-enabling smooth/auto scrolling doesn't crashes reliably, I am moving this into Firefox:General.

(In reply to racecarlock from comment #7)

However, I don't think this entirely means there aren't problems on the browser's end to check out. For example, webroot's system analyzer (before webroot was uninstalled in a PC reset) detected memory leaks in the browser too. And there are massive I/O spikes on process explorer as well as massive lag moments whenever the browser syncs. But I suppose those would be considered separate issues from this one.

I agree. Firefox has a lot of problems, and some of them lead to crash. That's said, in your case(s) it's hard to tell where the underlying problem which caused the crash is, whether it's (a) problem(s) in our end or not as of now.

Steve Fink [:sfink] [:s:]

Comment 9

•

3 years ago

(In reply to racecarlock from comment #7)

Bad ram, huh? Yeah, other errors I've gotten point to that too.

So, I turned the options back on and so far, no problems. Which means I might have to replace my ram chips. However, I still don't consider it entirely coincidental that turning these options off lessened the error rate.

I agree, I doubt it's a total coincidence. It probably exercised something that was more likely to trigger the problems with the RAM—assuming that is indeed the problem. I don't want to assume that without testing it.

But, maybe that's just because replacing my ram chips is going to be costly and will probably suck. It's only been 2 years and I had best buy help me pick parts and I had the geek squad help build it to avoid problems like this.

A free memory tester (I think memtest86+ is often recommended?) should hopefully (1) make sure your RAM really is bad, and (2) identify which RAM stick is the problem so you don't have to replace all of them.

Good luck.

Hiroyuki Ikezoe (:hiro)

Updated

•

3 years ago

Component: Panning and Zooming → General

Product: Core → Firefox

Drew Willcoxon :adw

Comment 10

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3 years ago

This doesn't sound actionable currently and the crashes don't seem to be related to scrolling. I'll close this now, but reporter, if you replace your RAM and are still able to reproduce this, please let us know. Copying Steve's comments so next steps are clear:

I think the best next steps are checking whether it happens in a fresh profile and running a memory tester. Also, it would be good to know whether it requires both prefs to be enabled, and if not, which one triggers this.

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED

Closed: 3 years ago

Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME

Bugzilla

Scroll options cause browser crashes

Categories

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Tracking

()

People

(Reporter: racecarlock, Unassigned)

References

Details

Crash Data

Security

(public)

User Story

Description

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Updated

Comment 10