514418 - Placing profile on RAM drive results in system instability

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Vadim Rapp]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2

This problem may be caused not by Firefox itself but by the 3rd party driver, but nevertheless...

On my machine I installed Ramdisk (http://www.dataram.com/products-and-services/ramdisk ) - hard drive emulated by RAM. Compared to the one that comes with Windows, this one can be made persistent, i.e. the driver saves the contents of the drive in the background to the file on physical disk.

This drive has been working OK for months while I was keeping on it temp files. Then I moved to it Firefox profile. As soon as I did that, Firefox started hanging in the middle of work. I open Firefox, and in several minutes it will hang, even when I let it sit on one webpage and not browsing anything. When It hangs, it effectively kills the whole system - processes can't be neither closed, nor killed, system shutdown does not work. 

The developers of this driver state that it was built according to WDM specifications, and this emulated drive works OK for seemingly all other purposes. Perhaps Firefox is doing with the profile files something out of specs that is not expected by the drive.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. install dataram (http://www.dataram.com/products-and-services/ramdisk )
2. move Firefox profile to the new drive emulated by dataram
3. open Firefox on any webpage
4. wait several minutes until Firefox becomes inaccessible, and kills the whole system
Actual Results:  
system becomes inaccessible