370474 - Crash on restart when sessionstore.js is too large (more than 128K)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Peter Janes]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061208 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061208 Firefox/2.0.0.1

If Firefox crashes or is closed when sessionstore.js is too large, it crashes almost immediately on startup.  This appears to be triggered when sessionstore.js is 128K in size or greater.  I'm regularly near this line due to having many (approximately 100) tabs open at once, each contributing its own cookies and history to the session.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Firefox.
2. Verify that "When Firefox starts" is set to "Show my windows and tabs from last time" in the Main tab of Firefox Preferences.
3. Open many tabs and navigate to several pages in them, watching the size of the profile's sessionstore.js file.
4. When sessionstore.js reaches 128K, exit Firefox via File|Quit.
5. Restart Firefox.
Actual Results:  
Firefox attempts to reopen all of the tabs, then crashes.

Expected Results:  
All tabs in the previous session should be restored, and the browser shouldn't crash.

Removing sessionstore.js allows Firefox to start.  Alternatively, the file can be trimmed to less than the maximum size in a text editor, although it's not easy.  Both involve data loss to some extent.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Peter, do you still see this problem when using the newest update?

I'm sure other people have sessionstore sizes much larger without trouble (I've got 900k right now and I'm sure I've restored from larger).  I'd be more inclined to suspect the issue to be contents (i.e. related to certain URLs ) than size.

Comment 2

[Peter Janes]

I haven't seen it happen recently, and I suspect it may have been related to specific URLs.  Or, rather, plugins used by those URLs: looking at the sessionstore.js files I've saved, the last URL in most of them includes a Flash object.  It's interesting, though, that when I trimmed the size of the file (by removing saved tabs, cookies, etc.) Firefox could often restart, regardless of the presence of objects that invoked plugins (or would if they weren't blocked by Flashblock).

Comment 3

[Simon Bünzli]

Closing as WORKSFORME as this issue has not been observed again - however we've since heard of people having significantly bigger sessions (see e.g. bug 396375) without encountering such a crash.

Peter: Should you continue to have crashes, please update to Firefox 3.0 and make sure to submit the crash data through Mozilla's Crash Reporter for further analysis. My guess would be that you've had an overloaded plugin (such as an older Flash version) present on several of the restored pages.

Comment 4

[Peter Janes]

The only restart crashes I've seen since upgrading to Firefox 3.0 have been Flash-related; i.e. WORKSFORME too.  Not sure if I should mark this VERIFIED, so I'll leave it as is.