195359 - Occasional system crash (hang) when scrolling a webpage down with mouse

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Marcel Schaap]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

Very Occasionally the Mozilla browser crashes when scrolling down by dragging
the scroll bar with the mouse.  This problem happens infrequently (once a week
or less) and on a system that is otherwise not busy. Unfortunately, I cannot
reproduce this problem and cannot tell whether this occurs for specific sites
(sorry).  I suspect it _may_ be a hardware or X-windows problem, but it seems to
 happen only in mozilla and not in other X-win progs.  
It could also be a dupe of bug 120893.  However, that report is for a windows
system and earlier versions of Mozilla.  

Reproducible: Couldn't Reproduce

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go with mouse to vertical scroll bar and drag down. Maybe I pull the mouse 
sideways off screen while dragging, but I'm not sure because the mouse cursor
disappears.  
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
This happens very infrequently: mouse cursor disapears and system absolutely
freezes and requires a hard boot.  

Expected Results:  
(not freeze :-) 

System is a Toshiba 2805 S201 laptop (celeron 650 MHz), 320MB ram, 40 GB HD,
running Mandrake linux 9.0 2.4.19-16mdk.  The mozilla version is 1.21 binary
from mozilla.org, not the mandrake version.
Video hardware: S3 Savage/IX-M  8 MB ram (?)
Window manager: GNOME 2.0 + sawfish (standard mandrake)

Comment 1

[Andrew Schultz]

> system absolutely freezes and requires a hard boot.

this is the signature of a hardware (or driver) problem.  Mozilla tends to hit
video cards pretty hard (which is consistent with scrolling).  What driver are
you using (manufacturer, XFree86, etc...)?  What version of XFree86 do you have?

Comment 2

[Marcel Schaap]

I'm Running XFree 4.2.1  om Mandrake 2.4.18-23mdkenterprise i686 [ELF]
XFree loads without any errors/warnings  (I can provide the XFree log file if
necessary, it is pretty long though)

I'm using Gnome 2.0  (standard Mandrake 9.0)

Comment 3

[Jason Wong]

Using 20040122 on fedora core 1 with a matrox G550 this is 100% reproducible.

To reproduce

1) visit almost any URL with images, here's one:
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

2) scroll quickly up and down using the mouse to drag the scroll bar or mousewheel.

I hang 100% of the time.

Comment 4

[Jason Wong]

Sorry, forgot to mention that this does not effect firebird (20040121).  So I
think that rules out the hardware.

Also, if Asa isn't listening to this bug, who's the approriate person to cc?

Comment 5

[Jason Wong]

Talked with doron and aku on irc and tried the following:
disabled images -- still hung
downloaded the latest nightly (20040128) -- still hung
clean install with new profile -- still hung

Comment 6

[Andrew Schultz]

Jason: if you're seeing a system hang like Marcel, it's likely to be a hardware
or driver problem (not Mozilla's fault).  If you're not seeing a system hang,
then it's a different bug than this one and you should file a new report (and/or
look again for other bugs that are closer to what you're actually seeing).

Marcel: are you still having this problem?

Comment 7

[Marcel Schaap]

Hi Andrew, Jason

here are my thoughts.

The problem now occurs "less often" on my system. Still the old Toshiba Laptop,
650 MHz Celeron.  I recently upgraded to GNOME 2.4, Mandrake 9.2.  I now have
Moz 1.4.

I think the poblem started to occur less often (~ once per month vs once per
week) after I upgraded X to 4.3  from 4.2.1.  I downloaded 4.3 from the XFree
website and ran the install myself.  However, after upgrading to Mandrake to 9.2
and Gnome 2.4 the problem is occurring "somewhat" more often again.  I noticed
that Mandrake's X 4.3 binaries are different from the 4.3 ones I installed
myself about half a year ago (different compiler options?).  Strangely enough I
cannot install X 4.3 myself anymore - something goes wrong in the install process.

In addition, I recently noticed that the problem is not limited to Mozilla. 
Apparently, writing lots of data to a terminal window screen can also lead to
reported system crash. The particular terminal app did interact with the Linux
Kernel very heavily.

I cannot reproduce Jason Wongs problem with the Google site. Note that Jason and
I have different Graphics cards. I don't know whether Jason uses Linux.

I guess this is a one of those really tricky things to solve.  My conclusion now
is that it is probably NOT a Mozilla problem, but more likely a hardware or 
X-windows problem.  Perhaps both.   Problem does occur during scrolling  (either
manually or by lots of program output in a terminal window), so it may be that
the graphics card or X cannot keep up.

Although sometimes annoying, the problem doesn't currently bother me enough to
invest more time in it.  It happens so infrequently that it would be hard to
figure out what would solve it...

Thanks!

Comment 8

[Andrew Schultz]

> My conclusion now is that it is probably NOT a Mozilla problem, but more likely 
> a hardware or X-windows problem.

that sounds like a reasonable conclusion to me.  I'll mark this INVALID (not a
Mozilla bug), but if you somehow find evidence to suggest otherwise, please
reopen with more information.