516972 - Network change not always detected when resuming from Standby/Hibernation

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Michael Kraft [:morac]]

Attachment: Add-on to log network and offline transition events to console

I frequently hibernate or sleep my laptop running Windows XP SP3.  I leave Firefox 3.5.x open while doing so.  I frequently find that after resuming from hibernation, that Firefox is in offline mode even though the network connection has been restored.  The longer the computer has been sleeping/hibernating, the greater the chance of this occurring.  So if I hibernate it for a few minutes it's not an issue, but it's pretty much guaranteed to do so if I hibernate it for 24 hours.  Because of that I think it may have something to do with Windows doing DHCP renewal upon resuming from hibernation.

I wrote an add-on that dumps out the detected network transition states (see attached file) and found that when the problem occurs, that Firefox does not detect the network transition to up upon resuming from hibernation, i.e. "network:link-status-changed" notification of "up" is never sent in that case. As such offline mode is never disabled.

At this point, there are two choices:
1. Disable my wireless network card and then re-enable it as Firefox properly detects the transitions at this point.
2. Manually disable offline mode - this disables automatic detection until Firefox is restarted.

It got to the point where it was so annoying that I wrote an add-on to disable offline detection - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13152 and founds that a few other add-ons have been written to do the same exact thing.

I'm not the only person to see this.  I've seen a number of complaints elsewhere.  Here's a few:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1453205
http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?comments_parentId=442366&forumId=1
http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?comments_parentId=427644&forumId=1

I searched and found another bug, bug 473179, documenting the same problem, but it is specifically for a beta build of Windows 7 and claims the problem happens every time Windows 7 wakes from sleep.  This might be a dupe, but I don't see the problem every time and I'm not running Windows 7.

I tried looking at the network detection code in http://mxr.mozilla.org/firefox/source/netwerk/system/win32/nsNotifyAddrListener.cpp, but it doesn't appear to log any data so I have no idea which of the three network detection methods it used or if it actually detected the network change, but somehow the notification got lost.  It looks like the code continuously runs so it should just keep broadcasting the network status, but it obviously doesn't do that so I must be misinterpreting how it works.  I would think that there should be a way for Firefox to know that the network is actually in the up state if it somehow misses the transition from down to up.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

still seeing this with version 4?

potentially related
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?type1-0-0=anywordssubstr&keywords=perf&keywords_type=nowords&field0-0-0=short_desc&bug_severity=blocker&bug_severity=critical&bug_severity=major&bug_severity=normal&type0-0-1=substring&field0-0-1=component&type1-0-1=anywordssubstr&resolution=---&resolution=DUPLICATE&value1-0-1=work%20lost&chfieldto=Now&query_format=advanced&chfieldfrom=2009-01-01&value1-0-0=hang&longdesc=sleep%20wake%20waki%20hibernat%20resum&value0-0-1=network&type0-0-0=anywordssubstr&value0-0-0=connect%20network%20sleep%20wake%20waki%20hibernat&field1-0-0=keywords&longdesc_type=anywordssubstr&product=Core&product=MailNews%20Core&product=NSPR&product=Thunderbird&field1-0-1=short_desc

Comment 2

[Michael Kraft [:morac]]

Network detection is disabled by default in Firefox 4 (by hidden preference) so the issue is hidden.  I set that preference long ago back in Firefox 3.6 so I wouldn't know if it's fixed or not.

Comment 3

[Martin Sch]

maybe bug 646189 is related.

Comment 4

[bela]

. Thunderbird loses setup SMTP server (message "wrong password") after hibernation on XP SP3 (or maybe it goes into offline mode?)  If I after that restart the computer, all was normal again. So i have to give up from the Thunderbird or from hibernation

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to bela from comment #4)
> . Thunderbird loses setup SMTP server (message "wrong password") after
> hibernation on XP SP3 (or maybe it goes into offline mode?)  If I after that
> restart the computer, all was normal again. So i have to give up from the
> Thunderbird or from hibernation

bela, at what version of Thunderbird did you start seeing this problem?

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #5)
> bela, at what version of Thunderbird did you start seeing this problem?

bela writes "TB17". So perhaps this his/her problem is not this bug

Comment 7

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

bagder added wide network change detection last year