306742 - Running Firefox/Thunderbird for extended periods of time can cause machine to hang

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core Graveyard :: Widget: Mac, defect, P1)

Description

[Kevin L. Buterbaugh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

If I visit certain web sites on any Mac I've tried running OS X 10.4.2 and
Firefox 1.0.6, after approximately 1.5 hours with a tab open on the site (the
site referenced above causes the problem every time), almost my entire system
freezes.  Terminals won't accept commands.  Firefox is frozen.  New apps cannot
be launched.  Even the Apple menu is not usable.  The only way to recover is a
hard power cycle.  

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Use Firefox 1.0.6 on MacOS X 10.4.2
2.  Go to http://www.newschannel5.com/content/weather/radar_Tnarea.shtml
3.  Wait approximately 1.5 hours

Actual Results:  
System freeze - hard power cycle required to recover.

Expected Results:  
Ummm, not freeze my system!  ;-)

Camino 0.8.4 also has this problem, as well.

Comment 1

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

The page you gave has no Java on it. Can you list other websites that cause your
computer to freeze?

Comment 2

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

When you say that you couldn't launch apps, if you clicked their dock icons, did
the icon bounce for a while, then just stop without anything launching?

Comment 3

[Kevin L. Buterbaugh]

OK, so it's evidently not a Java bug, then.  Sorry.  That was speculation on my part.  The newschannel5 
web site is the one site that I can guarantee will cause the freeze *every* time.  I can cause a freeze on 
multiple Macs just by launching Firefox and going to that site and waiting ~1.5 hours.  I did have one 
other freeze without it being open in a tab.  I had www.cnn.com, www.usatoday.com, and one other site 
which I unfortunately can't recall open in tabs.

As far as launching apps is concerned - yes, when I would click on a dock icon it would bounce for a few 
seconds, then stop.  I almost always have a terminal open on my system and it will not accept commands.  
However, I also usually have other terminals open ssh'd into other servers and those are fine.

Also, Thunderbird 1.0.6 will continue to allow me to read mail, but will not send mail.

Comment 4

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Hm, this sounds very much like what I was seeing when I was pushing Camino
heavily when testing ad blocking. I did some investigation, but didn't find any
smoking guns (I was using lsof to looked for leaked file descriptors).

Kevin: one thing you should do for starters is to run Disk Utility and do a
Repair Permissions and Repair Disk (when I was seeing this, I had some disk errors).

Also, keep top running in a Terminal window, and keep an eye on the stats for
Firefox. Are there some numbers that keep going up?

Comment 5

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Kevin: another thing to do is to run some older Firefox builds, and try to find
out when this problem started. If it also affects Camino 0.8.4, it must be
pretty old.

Comment 6

[Kevin L. Buterbaugh]

Hold the phone - I just came back from lunch an hour ago and my PowerBook was frozen after almost 24 
hours of uptime ... and I wasn't running Firefox (I was using Safari 2.0.1).

I thought this had to be a Firefox problem because it happened on my Mac Mini when Firefox was the only 
application I was running.  Now it's looking like this may be some sort of OS bug that affects all browsers.  
I apologize if this does turn out to not be a Firefox bug and I hope you'll understand why I thought it was.

Here's what I'm doing now - I'm running all my normal apps except a web browser on my PowerBook.  I'm 
running Safari on my Mac Mini with the same tabs open as when I went to lunch.  I've got two terminals 
open:  one doing a "top -s 5 -o cpu" and the other doing a "vm_stat 5".  We'll see what happens... 

Comment 7

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Any update here?

Comment 8

[Kevin L. Buterbaugh]

No news - I left Safari up over the Labor Day weekend and used it all day
yesterday without getting a freeze.  Today I'm trying Firefox again, but so far
no  freeze.  If I can get a freeze, I'll call Apple and update this...

Comment 9

[Kevin L. Buterbaugh]

An update - I cannot get a system freeze with Safari by itself or in combination with Apple's mail client 
running (I've tried for a week now).  However, I *can* get a freeze with Safari and Thunderbird 1.0.6 
running!  Also, it occurred to me that I can't recall my system freezing with Thunderbird running, but 
no browser running.

When this happens, everything shows the same symptoms as I described earlier.  I have noted that if I 
quit Thunderbird via the menu or menu shortcut, it does not quit cleanly.  According to "Activity 
Monitor" it's hung.  I can "Force Quit" it from there, however.

At this point I believe that there's two issues here.  First, Firefox and Thunderbird appear to be 
triggering some sort of operating system issue.  Second, MacOS X 10.4.2 has an OS bug, or Firefox / 
Thunderbird wouldn't be able to freeze the system.

Any thoughts, anyone?

Comment 10

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

I think there may be an OS bug here:
http://www.macfixitforums.com/php/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=tiger&Number=715824&page=0&view=expanded&sb=5&o=31&fpart=
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20050920082512401

Comment 11

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Another url:
http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Technical/Lookupd.html

Comment 12

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Bug 131456 is already fixed but the fix never will be applied to Firefox 1.0.x.
So virtual memory allocated to Firefox 1.0.x increases forever.

Workaround: Restart Firefox 1.0.x if he(she) ate large virtual memory.

Comment 13

[Kevin L. Buterbaugh]

It makes sense to me that I could be hitting the lookupd bug.  I have applied
the following tuning suggestions for lookupd from one of the articles Simon sent
me the link for:

   1. sudo mkdir /etc/lookupd
   2. sudo sh -c "echo TimeToLive 300 > /etc/lookupd/hosts"
   3. sudo sh -c "echo ValidateCache NO >> /etc/lookupd/hosts"

I am now using Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 to test.  I also have a terminal open in which
I've already done a "sudo bash" - if I get a freeze I'll try killing lookupd and
crashreporter (as another article suggested).  We'll see what happens...

Comment 14

[Kevin L. Buterbaugh]

I have had multiple instances where Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 locked up on me, but not
my whole system.  Since Firefox 1.0.7 was released, I downloaded it and have not
had any lockups of any sort since doing so.

At this point as far as I'm concerned this bug report can be closed.  I
apologize again for opening a bug report here when the problem is really with
Apple's software.  Thank you for your help...

Comment 15

[Josh Aas]

Closing this bug as we're not making progress, the reporter doesn't see the problem any more, and it may have been an OS bug in the first place which is totally unrelated to mozilla's code.