906944 - Use a heartbeat to detect hanging childs

Status: NEW

(Core :: IPC, defect)

Description

[Tom S [:evilpie]]

Attachment: lastmessagetime

I have been working on a way to detect hanging children. The current approach mostly lives in ContentParent/ContentChild and I am thinking about even removing the change to RPCChannel. Of course we could also move everything into the ipc layer, but I feel it's actually simpler to do the way I did, because we have easier access to various functions. For example KillHard. It also avoids including some random things into the IPC layer like timers. One problem that dvander already pointed out that when the computer suspends or the chrome process hangs, we shouldn't kill the child.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Won't this cause every content process to wake up regularly? In general we shouldn't cause wakeups unless we actually need the content process.

Comment 2

[Tom S [:evilpie]]

Yeah we probably don't want this. One problem is wake-ups and the other problem is handling computers going into the suspended state. We should always try to avoid killing a process when it's not necessary.

Comment 3

[Tom S [:evilpie]]

Not sure if we even want to do this. But I am not working on this.

Comment 4

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Mass tracking-e10s flag change. Filter bugmail on "2be0fcce-e36a-4e2c-aa80-0e3d33eb5406".