935397 - Firefox asks/proposes to Reset Firefox every other day. $HOME is on NFS, .profilelock date is not updated

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[harald.dunkel]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131025151332

Steps to reproduce:

Every other day Firefox asks me to "reset firefox" at startup time. I did this only one: It whiped out all my extensions. It took me _way_ to much time to load all this stuff from my backup again.

How can I get rid of this annoyance?

Comment 1

[Loic]

Read https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems

You can reset your profile in about:support. I'm surprised Firefox asked you at startup...

Comment 2

[[:Aleksej]]

Reset Firefox copies your existing profile to the desktop directory (like ~/Desktop).

Comment 3

[harald.dunkel]

I don't want to reset anything. It should stop asking.

Comment 4

[Noah (NoahSUMO/SolidSnake) [:Noah]]

Type about:support into the address bar and press enter. Then from the "Troubleshooting Information" page that opens, highlight everything under the "Extensions" & "Important Modified Preferences" sections and copy and paste it here.

This will let us see your addons. One or more of them might be causing Firefox to have a very slow startup time which is causing that reset option to appear at startup. But since the bug about this hasn't been fixed yet (Bug 872172), this doesn't happen in Firefox currently. Instead if Fx starts up slow more than 5 times, you should be shown a link to a help article about resetting Firefox (Bug 901747).

So my next guess is Firefox crashes for you sometimes at startup which causes the reset option to appear the next time you open Firefox. Compare your problem to Bug 881199 or Bug 877691. Has Firefox been crashing for you at all?

If not, could be you have a bad value or setting in the prefs.js file in your Firefox profile that's causing this.

Comment 5

[harald.dunkel]

I cannot remember when Firefox crashed for the last time. Please note that my $HOME is on a NFS server, which might introduce some lagging. I will attach the troubleshooting info.

Comment 6

[harald.dunkel]

Attachment: troubleshooting info

Comment 7

[[:Aleksej]]

Could it be caused by bug 498181?  See 498181 comment 44.

Comment 8

[[:Aleksej]]

* bug 498181 comment 44.

Comment 9

[harald.dunkel]

my .mozilla/firefox/*.default/.parentlock was modified last on Aug 26th. Do you think I should remove this file?

Comment 10

[[:Aleksej]]

It should be safe to remove .parentlock.  Have you tried it yet?

Comment 11

[[:Aleksej]]

Also, was Firefox saying anything like "It looks like you haven't started Nightly in a while ..."?

Comment 12

[harald.dunkel]

After removing the .parentlock the message at start time is gone. If I move it back into place, then the message is back, too.

I will attach a screenshot of the message.

Comment 13

[harald.dunkel]

Attachment: Firefox screenshot

Comment 14

[[:Aleksej]]

Thanks.

Comment 15

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

I have a test NFS setup I used for the profile lock stuff last year. Hopefully I can reproduce the problem.

Comment 16

[harald.dunkel]

Here are the mount options for my $HOME: 
nfs-home:/space/home on /home type nfs4 (rw,noatime,vers=4.0,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,port=0,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,clientaddr=172.xx.yy.128,local_lock=none,addr=172.xx.zz.218)

Please note the "noatime". Hope this helps.

Comment 17

[harald.dunkel]

The problem still exists. Any news on this? Is there some way to turn off the whole check?

Comment 18

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

You could remove the profile lock file before every startup as a workaround. I haven't had time to look at this as I'm busy working on Australis. Sorry.

Is "noatime" a common setup for a partition with Firefox profiles? Perhaps you could remove that option?

Comment 19

[harald.dunkel]

Yes, noatime is standard. The default is relatime. Does relatime help to avoid loosing my Firefox extensions?