Debugging crashes in complex environment with no crash report
Hi all, I'm having a lot of problems with Firefox crashing pretty often. Sometimes once or twice a day.
I most often see crashes in the middle of a Webex video conference for work. But Firefox sometimes goes down in other situations that I see no pattern in.
This is Ubuntu 20.04, Firefox 102.0. Unfortunately, it's a complex environment to debug.
First, when firefox goes down, it rarely leaves a crash report behind. So I'm not getting any direct evidence as to what is happening. Second, I run with uBlock active and it is very difficult to function in the browser without long enough for the crash to happen. Third, I typically have several hundred tabs open. I have a lot of memory (64G) in my machine, and the machine doesn't act like it's swapping, so I don't think I'm running out of memory.
Any help getting to the bottom of what's going on is welcome.
All Replies (5)
I'm using the Ubuntu firefox package. I have tried the Mozilla firefox in the past as well.
The issue I have with deleting the profile, is there is a lot of stuff in the profile that I actually use and don't want to lose. Also the window state I have is important and hard to save and recreate.
I guess I was hoping that I could run firefox in gdb or under strace and save enough useful info when it crashes to provide developers enough to go further.
Try downloading Firefox from Mozilla, run it from the folder and see if you have the same issue. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/#product-desktop-release
Have you tried the same steps under a different ubuntu account? Did you run strace?
Modified by jonzn4SUSE
Hi jonzn4SUSE, I ran strace, only on the initial process. That generates a 22G file by itself, as well as slowing down significantly. I think it's not likely practical to strace the full browser.
On the console, I do see the following consistently on exit.
... Exiting due to channel error. Exiting due to channel error. Exiting due to channel error. Exiting due to channel error. CPU time limit exceeded (core dumped)
and
Exiting due to channel error. [GFX1-]: Receive IPC close with reason=AbnormalShutdown Exiting due to channel error. Exiting due to channel error. +++ killed by SIGXCPU (core dumped) +++
I don't know if the last message offers more clue as to what is going on.
I could run the browser under gdb, but I wouldn't know which child to follow. I've got 50 firefox-bin child processes.
Just need more info before it closes.