439142 - Frequent crashes

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Mitra Ardron]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-GB; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061004 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: version 3.0a2pre (2008061203)

Thunderbird seems to get itself into an unstable state, it crashes frequently - sometimes every few minutes, sometimes even when restarting. 

I'll attach Apple's stack-trace, and have clicked the reporter in t'bird so its probably sent information to somewhere the developers have access.

I haven't spotted a pattern, sometimes its during writing a message, sometimes during Get-Messages, sometimes when I'm not even using it (so maybe its getting mail). 

This crash is bad enough and frequent enough for me to switch back to Tbird 2.0.0.6

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Mitra Ardron]

Attachment: Apple Stack trace

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Do you get a breakpad crash id?
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Breakpad#Location_of_crash_reports

Comment 3

[Mitra Ardron]

There is a BUG on that link, it tells you the location for Firefox rather than TB which is in ~/Library/Thunderbird/Crash Reports rther than ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Crash Reports.  I thought I wasnt getting any reports. 

Some recent crash reports
Pending:
C2A3953C-24B3-4BF8-A087-AC99FCFAF9E4
9C5657F9-ECEB-451E-B73C-97F67D01DBFE
54D45003-6B0F-456C-BCAD-6694ABBC9F44
Submitted
c1cb92e8-3996-11dd-9bc2-001a4bd46e84
10b32c97-3996-11dd-b0c1-001cc45a2ce4
(lots more available on request)
But ... e.g. 
http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/10b32c97-3996-11dd-b0c1-001cc45a2ce4?date=2008-06-13-22
Doesnt' seem to show anything about the crash.

(i've got lots more - it does this regularly enough to make TB unusable)

Comment 4

[Mitra Ardron]

Does anyone know how to make these crash reports useful?

I've tried to narrow down the bug, for example I thought it was during startup looking at a large mailbox, but I've eliminated that 

Comment 5

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Does anyone know how to make these crash reports useful?

Unfortunately, bug 411171 is preventing these being useful, so the only way to do it would be to build Thunderbird yourself with symbols... (but see below)

> I've tried to narrow down the bug, for example I thought it was during startup
> looking at a large mailbox, but I've eliminated that 

I've done a bit of investigation and found bug 434091 - the stack of the hang on that bug looks pretty much like your apple report. In Bug 434091 comment 21, where the reporter has actually succeeded getting symbols, shows that that bug is a duplicate of bug 411988 because the symbols weren't right in the apple report for some reason.

So I expect this may be a duplicate of bug 411988. So it may be that you've got a base64 encoded message that Thunderbird is trying to download - take a look and see what you think.

Comment 6

[Mitra Ardron]

Thanks 

Checking (doing a grep on my pop sever) , there are indeed base64 messages in my folder, lots of them - from several people, so I presume that is not uncommon enough for this to be a rare bug? 

Note - there seems to also be a problem - and I'm not sure if it is related, where TB says it is downloading a lot of messages when it starts up. This is despite these messages having been previously downloaded.  I've also only noticed this when it restarts after crashing. 

Is there something specific about a base64 message that might be causing it, that i could look for  - I'm not managing to find anything in that other bug. 

- Mitra

Comment 7

[Mitra Ardron]

Attachment: Copy of my mail spool including just one message that consistently crashes tb

Comment 8

[Mitra Ardron]

This bug is still present in version 3.0a2pre (2008062503) 

I have another messages that trigger this: here are the headers. 

This time its not spam, but is a message generated by the mailing list server at www.globalideasbank.org



Return-Path: <[e-mail]>
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.3 (2007-08-08) on pandora.path.net
X-Spam-Level: *
X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.5 required=8.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_50,HTML_MESSAGE,
     MIME_BASE64_BLANKS,MIME_BASE64_TEXT autolearn=no version=3.2.3
Received: from scruffy.kempt.co.uk (kempt.customer.ultraspeed.co.uk [62.149.33.20] (may be forged))
     by mail.path.net (8.14.2/8.13.8) with ESMTP id m5QBZh60025489
     (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NO)
     for <[e-mail]>; Thu, 26 Jun 2008 04:35:45 -0700
Received: from scruffy.kempt.co.uk (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1])
     by scruffy.kempt.co.uk (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id m5QAlDc6015613
     for <[e-mail]>; Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:47:13 +0100
Received: (from apache@localhost)
     by scruffy.kempt.co.uk (8.13.1/8.13.1/Submit) id m5QAlDHs015610;
     Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:47:13 +0100
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:47:13 +0100
Message-Id: <[e-mail]>
X-Authentication-Warning: scruffy.kempt.co.uk: apache set sender to [e-mail] using -f
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Ideas of the Week
From: Global Ideas Bank <[e-mail]>
Reply-To: Global Ideas Bank <[e-mail]>
X-Mailer: GIBMail
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary = HTMLDEMO486373b1aba5c
         

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

dep. to make sure we touch this when bug 411171 is fixed

Comment 10

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

You should have symbols since the move to mercurial and buildbot-based builds, try a 3.0b1pre nightly.

Comment 11

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Mitra, could you also provide a MBOX file as a small testcase which contains your mentioned message? That makes it easier for us to reproduce the issue.

Comment 12

[Mitra Ardron]

Attachment: mailbox file containing one bad message

Here is a mailbox file with just one message. 

If I want to repeat the bug , I copy this file to my mailbox file (/var/spool/mail/mitra ) and then do a "Get Mail"

Comment 13

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Mitra, does it also occur with a fresh profile? I can't reproduce it with a current Shredder nightly build. I copied it into my mail folder and hit "Get Mail". It was copied directly into Junk and even opening it afterwards doesn't crash the client.

Comment 14

[Mitra Ardron]

Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean "with a fresh profile"

- Mitra

Comment 15

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

You should use the profile manager to create a new profile. It will be shown when using the command line option "-p".

Comment 16

[Mitra Ardron]

Sorry - please be clearer - how do I give a command line option to Shredder? Which is started from my toolbar (yes I'm familiar with the unix terminal, just not sure how to start Shredder from it. 

And also - please confirm how I would get back my old data / emails etc if I do this. 

Comment 17

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Mitra, searching knowledgebase will often help.  yields http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager#Accessing_the_Profile_Manager

Comment 18

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

 Mitra Mac crash reports are much better now. Can you reproduce the crash and post the breakpad report?

Comment 19

[Mitra Ardron]

Hi Wayne

Somewhere along the line that bug has been fixed, I've tried to repeat using the test message I had saved and it now downloads fine without a crash.

I think this bug can be considerd Resolved now.

- Mitra

Comment 20

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Fixed is only used for bugs with known patches. Let's mark it as WFM

Comment 21

[Mitra Ardron]

Thanks, 

I don't know if its relevant, but after testing with the previously bad message - which appeared to work, next time I used TB i found my database corrupt, and Time Machine failed to restore it. So I'm now unable to use TB - I don't know if its related to this problem, probably not, but I thought I'd post it here just in case, and I'd also appreciate any help to restore TB so that I can continue using it! 

See bug 474091