660418 - Glitch with Flash and 4.0.1

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Patrick Elliott]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

Note, this may be more of a fix report, than a bug report, but I can't confirm it yet. Basically, some time between running 3.6, which never like Flash much either (you never wanted to leave it open after playing 3-4 movies via Youtube or the like, without seeing performance degrade), and 4.0.1, things went really bad. Two simple pages, one with a captcha and button, and another with just a drop down menu, and button, would crash the client, semi-randomly. They would "post" correctly, as far as the website was concerned, but the reload would blow up Firefox.

That said, that problem seems, so far, fixed. I believe it was related to a bad patch of this file: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=46&SrcFamilyId=FB01ABE6-9099-4544-9AEC-0AC13F19BC50&SrcDisplayLang=en&u=http%3a%2f%2fdownload.microsoft.com%2fdownload%2f3%2f0%2f5%2f305BF178-5F7C-489E-8F39-C3257429E832%2fvcredist_x86.exe

The reason for that assumption is that it also fixed a problem I had with a pop-up menu (showed outline, but not items) for SOE's Station Launcher task tray item, and was the cause of some glitch in their Legends of Norrath card game, which caused EQII to crash, if accessing the inbuilt version, or the standalone version to crash with "unknown error". These problems went away when the patch was reapplied, and so did, in at least the first test, the problem with trying to use the vote pages which where killing Firefox 90% of the time.

As for the Flash issue.. Not sure yet. Its possible it is also related, but I haven't seen the problem so far yet, or run real testing. That problem is a major increase in the memory management issue that already happens with such things. Trying to play something from Youtube, or other location, after previously watching a few, would have a cumulative chance of causing the movie to lock up, and Firefox to start consuming every scrap of available memory, very very rapidly. Usually, Flashes problem isn't a blind feeding frenzy, but a slow swallowing of memory, due to the fact that it doesn't, as far as I can see, play well with *anything*. As I understand it, it either doesn't, or fails to properly, inform the host that its done, so never signals an, "unload my allocated memory", message, so its never freed. Bad, bad, design imho, if true. In any case, its made me want to bury the code for it, along with its creator, in a hole some place, then forget where that was, for a long time. lol

We will see if the fix for my other issues fixed this back to 3.6 standards... I still consider Firefox with Flash installed to be a bug, by definition, sort of like using IE, or Outlook, on Windows, is the same as already having a virus. ;) But, maybe, at some point, these issues will get resolved.

In the mean time, if I did fix my problem, you at least know what is causing it, for anyone else having the issue, which would be enough people playing SOE games that there is a web post about how to fix *their* problem, on another forum.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit http://mostpopularsites.net/muds/votein.php?ID=94
2. Type in the captcha.
3. Click the button.

Or, in the other case.

1. Play several movies.
2. Have, seemingly randomly, the movie lock up, and soon after, the entire machine, due to memory use, and processor overhead.

Actual Results:  
First case - Crash, semi-consistently, like 90% of the time.

Second case - More random, but I started closing the browser between uses, so as to escape it. Problem may have started in 3.6, but was *way* less common there, and when it did happen it was not necessarily Flash related (not that you can tell, given how much **** is using flash now..)

Expected Results:  
Obviously, seeing the "your vote is recorded" page, in the first case. Memory properly released, no lockups, no rebooting the computer, just to have to reload the crashed session, and risk it happening all over (really needs to be a way to "keep" session items that didn't fully load BTW, so if a page is down, but its one you *always* load in the session, you don't lose it the moment things either crash, or you close the browser. Its damned annoying trying to find the bookmark again, assuming you made one, and/or remember what the page was).

Comment 1

[Patrick Elliott]

That "memory properly released, etc." part is, btw, second case. Not that I expect Flash to start doing that any time soon, but.. consuming 1GB of memory on a 2GB machine, with the other 1GB already taken up, in like 15 seconds is... a bit over the top. lol

Comment 2

[Patrick Elliott]

Right.. Crash problem is gone, the other one.. Not so much. Left it open over night, minimized. Came back this morning with it sluggish, so brought up the windows task list and watched as it crept from 120k to 200k, and climbing, at about 300k a second, before I closed the Firefox down and restarted it. Decided to remove some junk I didn't need, like duplicate java consoles and all the disabled junk from MS, as well as the AVG safe search, which I had to manually remove in the registry, just to clean things up a bit, but, not betting its going to help. There is definitely a glitch here.

BTW: The patch I mentioned before is KB981793, a hotfix of some sort, based on the install date. So, I am still getting memory issues, but at least things are "stable" now. Just like in 3.6. :(

Comment 3

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

What version of flash do you have? Are you using the most up to date graphics driver available for download from the manufacturer's website? Have you tried with a fresh profile?

Comment 4

[Patrick Elliott]

(In reply to comment #3)
> What version of flash do you have? Are you using the most up to date
> graphics driver available for download from the manufacturer's website? Have
> you tried with a fresh profile?

Hmm.. I posted an update on this, but it didn't seem to stick. Flash is latest, graphics drivers are up to date. It seems to be as stable as 3.6 was now, but I still have the old problem I ran into, once in a while, with that, where if I play a lot of flv movies, *sometimes* Firefox doesn't shut down properly (task icon goes missing, but its still "live" in the Windows task list, doesn't free memory, and never closes completely). Has to be killed manually. I am not even sure, looking through the menus, what you mean by "fresh profile"...

Comment 5

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

We're in the process of removing support for plugins (bug 1677160), so I think this bug is irrelevant now.