306440 - File handle leak for \Device\WS2IFSL\NifsSct

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[David Citron]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

Firefox seems to open too many handles to "\Device\WS2IFSL\NifsSct". After about
a week, there are 27,000 open file handles to that device. Every browsing action
causes more handles to be open. It appears as though perhaps
WPUCreateSocketHandle is being called without a corresponding WPUCloseSocketHandle?


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Open firefox
2.Browse to any web site
3.Watch the open handles and see them grow

Actual Results:  
Apparent file handle leak

Expected Results:  
Close IFS handles when finished with them

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Is this the same issue as mentioned in
<http://seclib.blogspot.com/2005_04_01_seclib_archive.html> ?

Note that there are no references to either NifsSct or WPUCreateSocketHandle
occur in the Mozilla/Gecko/Firefox sourcecode.

Comment 2

[David Citron]

Attachment: Screen shot of problem

Screen shot of ProcessExplorer showing some of the over 27,000 open handles.

Comment 3

[David Citron]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Is this the same issue as mentioned in
> <http://seclib.blogspot.com/2005_04_01_seclib_archive.html> ?
> Note that there are no references to either NifsSct or WPUCreateSocketHandle
> occur in the Mozilla/Gecko/Firefox sourcecode.

It appears to be the same issue that the blogspot poster is discussing. Please 
see the newly-attached screen shot for more details.

Comment 4

[Philipp Hanes]

I am seeing this too.  Not sure since when.
I first noticed it as a general slowdown in opening new windows.  At least I think that's related to this.  I'm still experimenting.
Certainly I've seen it twice now.
If there's anything I should try or not try, I'm open to suggestions.
Though I note that it usually takes a few days until this obviously manifests.
And I do have a number of extensions installed (without which I don't usually browse, though I could try for the sake of getting this bug fixed).
I'll keep an eye on the number of handles and such over the course of the next few days.
I quit my Firefox when it became unusable, which was at about 2700 handles open (most of them to \Device\WS2IFSL\NifsSct based on Process Explorer).
Please let me know what additional information I can provide.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1 - Build ID: 2006120418

Comment 5

[Philipp Hanes]

So this doesn't look entirely like it's a Mozilla problem.  Though since I use Firefox a lot, it has the biggest problems the fastest.
Even just starting Firefox to get the popup to choose a profile will create a few (2 or 3) handles to this thing, whatever it is.  So presumably it's not extension-specific.  This only happens on one of my machines.  Could it be plugins?  The Mozilla browser has the same problem, but I usually only open a few windows with that, and it definitely appears to be number-of-window-related.
Any insights would be very welcomed.  As has been noted elsewhere, there seems to be little or no indication via Google searches what this might be, other than a handful of other people having experienced the same problem.

Comment 6

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

The blogger found the issue, a DLL that gets injected, his case was a Netscape application.

and since only a few people got this issue over the years and the blogger confirmed that it occours with other processes and it's casued by buggy installed drivers on the system i will mark this invalid