493417 - Wolfram Alpha causing Firefox crashes/hangs?

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, defect)

Description

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

There seem to be reports of crashes/hangs on the newly-launched Wolfram Alpha site.

See comments in:

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/8kvey/wolframalpha_is_live/

A Twitter search for "Alpha firefox" also shows a number of recent tweets about crashes.

I couldn't find a good Digg thread, but didn't see anything in the Slashdot thread about the launch.

I've played around with the site since launch, and didn't notice anything -- although I did have one hang that may-or-may-not have been related (I had a lot of other tabs open). Blizzard just noted that he was seeing hangs.

Filing this for further investigation...

Comment 1

[Christopher Blizzard (:blizzard)]

I can get my Shiretoko build to hang every time I go there (on mac.)

Comment 2

[Nathan Furry]

I just tried Wolfram Alpha using FF3.5b4, I received a scripting error which I regrettably did not copy... It didn't cause Firefox to crash, however, it did cause a slight hang and then brought up the scripting error.

After several retries I could not repeat this error.

I don't know if this Helps at all but I hope it brings some light on the matter.

Comment 3

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Not sure why this should block Firefox 3.5's release; are we sure that we're the ones doing something wrong here?

Crash stacks or more debugging information would help.

Comment 4

[Christopher Blizzard (:blizzard)]

A (relatively) high profile web site crashing the browser?  Sure - feels like it's something we should do.

Can we query the crash status info for crashes on the web site?  Looks like you can't do that from the public interface - was wondering if we could do it from inside?

Comment 5

[Szabolcs Horvát]

In case this helps, I never got any *crashes* on the website, but I get frequent lockups, especially when the site is unresponsive.  This is with Firefox 3.0.10 on WinXP.

Comment 6

[Christopher Blizzard (:blizzard)]

Same here - hangs, not crashes.  Otherwise I would have me some stack traces.

Comment 7

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

I tried banging away on Alpha in my debug trunk build, but wasn't able to reproduce a hang.

Comment 8

[Jesse Ruderman]

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/20/still-hard-at-work/

"As we continue testing Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve noticed that users occasionally receive a 'Slow Script' warning when rendering Wolfram|Alpha pages. We hope to have a fix for this problem soon."

Comment 9

[Carlos Alén Silva]

I also experience hangs with Firefox 3.0.10 on WinXP.

Comment 10

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Adding topsite keyword, this site was covered at length in the Wall Street Journal as one of the popular pioneering search engines alongside Microsoft's Bling (soon to come) and others. Not sure if it qualifies it as a topsite, just wanted to throw this out there.

Comment 11

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Attachment: Sample from a build with symbols

I got lucky and caught this in my current trunk build -- opt, with symbols, Dtrace enabled. The sample doesn't look too useful, but the DTrace funcflow output seems to indicate the page's JS is running wild, largely doing jQuery stuff. Alas, the filenames imply minimized JS, so the line numbers don't help much. :(

Odd that we're not getting a slow-script warning here...

Comment 12

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Attachment: DTrace flowinfo during hang

Comment 13

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

FTR, the hang was on the results page for http://www21.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Are+you+Skynet%3F after it had loaded and displayed the page.

Comment 14

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

--> Core::JavaScript based on comment 11

Comment 15

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

FWIW, I haven't seen or heard of this recently. Though that could just be because Alpha's launch hype has died down.

Comment 16

[Damon Sicore (:damons)]

-'ing for 1.9.2 for now.  Re-nom if someone sees this again and wants to argue.

Comment 17

[Mike A. Harris]

I'm seeing this with Firefox 3.6.12 on CentOS 5.4 fully updated.  I can type "hello" into the wolfram alpha search box and submit and within 2 seconds or so Firefox completely crashes with a loud beep every time.  Using Minefield fully updated on Windows XP it works fine.  I'm going to do some experimentation on a fresh Firefox profile on the crashing browser etc. to see if I can narrow things down.  I have NoScript installed and so scripts were disabled on that site by default (in both Linux and XP test cases).

Comment 18

[Luke Wagner [:luke]]

No activity in 2 years, this seems to have been fixed.