486956 - Firefox freezes with two windows + multiple tabs open, eventually locks up entire Gnome session

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Bart Schaefer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009030610 CentOS/3.0.7-1.el4.centos Firefox/3.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009030610 CentOS/3.0.7-1.el4.centos Firefox/3.0.7

First incident, March 29 (copy/paste of notes I made at the time):

This morning I opened a new FF3 window to browse CNN.  I opened tabs
on five or six stories from the front page and then went to read
through them, closing each tab as I finished each story.  (There were
six other tabs open in the first FF window, so no more than 12-14 tabs
in two windows total.)  After closing the second such tab FF began
responding very slowly, even to simply scrolling the window, and
eventually stopped responding entirely (wouldn't even redraw when I
dragged windows around).  I popped up an xterm and ran "strace" on FF
to see if I could find the problem, and lo and behold as long as
strace was running FF recovered and responded fine, but when I stopped
tracing it froze again.  Unfortunately I lost the trace output because
of what happened next, but I do recall that it was calling first
stat64("/etc/localtime") and then several calls to gettimeofday(), repeatedly and very frequently.

I left strace running and went back to FF, hoping to see the tail of
the trace at the moment FF locked up again.  However, the next time FF
appeared to be frozen I found that not just FF but the entire Gnome
session was stuck.  I was able to move the mouse and to Alt-F2 into a
text console window, but nothing else responded.  I went back and
forth a few times between the text console and the X console
attempting to diagnose (including killing the strace and sending a
CONT signal to FF, because "ps" said FF was in stopped ("T") state),
but after a few passes at that even Alt-F2 stopped working.

Fortunately I have another computer here, so I ssh'd in and ran
"killall -1 firefox-bin".  This woke things up to the point that one
of the pending Alt-F2 keystrokes was seen and the text console came
up, but although I could then switch consoles again, nothing else in
the X session was responding.  I finally HUP'd gnome-session (which
stopped everything else; I checked "ps" to make sure nothing that had
been associated with that session was still running) and I have now
logged in again and everything seems fine.  FF restarted and restored
the session from the time I killed it, and an strace of it now doesn't
show any accesses to /etc/localtime at all.

I find this all especially strange because the whole system had been
restarted less than 12 hours before.

Second incident (April 5th):

Again I opened a new window and several CNN tabs.  No problem this time until I opened a couple of tabs on facebook as well; then closing the first of the two facebook tabs caused firefox to lock up.  Same strace symptoms (unfortunately I again failed to capture the output anywhere before I ended up needing to kill the entire Gnome session).

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start firefox, open at least seven tabs in the first window
2. Open a second window, visit CNN.com
3. Create at least three tabs by right-click on story headlines and selecting "open in new tab"
4. Select the rightmost tab, scroll through the story, then close the tab.
Actual Results:  
FF began responding very slowly, even to simply scrolling the window, and eventually stopped responding entirely (wouldn't even redraw when I dragged windows around).

Expected Results:  
I expected FF to keep responding normally. :-)

Add-ons currently enabled:
Abduction 2.026
Adblock Plus 1.0.1
ColorZilla 1.9
Dafizilla ViewSourceWith 0.4.1
DownThemAll! 1.1.2
Elasticfox 1.6.000097
HttpFox 0.8.3 (was not installed for first incident 3/29)
MR Tech About:About 2.4.2
NoScript 1.9.1.6
PDF Download 2.1.0.2
WebDeveloper 1.1.6

Comment 1

[Bart Schaefer]

Oops, hit submit before finishing up the description of the April 5 incident:

This time I restarted firefox before my whole session locked up.  When firefox restored the tabs after restarting, the problem came back until I closed the tab that had the facebook home page.

Aha, I thought, facebook has something to do with it ... so I started composing this note about it in gmail, and then right in the middle of the first paragraph above it started happening again, despite no change in what tabs were opened or closed -- so I now suspect closing tabs is merely coincidental and not related to the problem.  I'm now on my third (update: fourth) FF restart.  Whereas closing the facebook tab seemed to *stop* the loop after the first restart, closing a CNN tab seems to have *started* it this most recent time.  And just after I typed that, the whole session locked up again and I had to Alt-F2 to a console window and HUP gnome-session, so I'm typing *this* after logging back in and resuming everything.  Very annoying.

Comment 2

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

This is a mass search for bugs which are in the Firefox General component, are
UNCO, have not been changed for 500 days and have an unspecified version. 

Reporter, can you please update to Firefox 3.6.10 or later, create a fresh profile, http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/managing+profiles, and test again. If you still see the issue, please update this bug. If the issue is gone, please set the status to RESOLVED > WORKSFORME.

Comment 3

[Bart Schaefer]

Have not reproduced since upgrade to 3.5+