Firefox is creating huge numbers of crash reports.
Ever since updating to version 20 from 19 Firefox has been creating huge numbers of crash reports and filling up my hard drive. Yesterday it created 8609 reports totaling 312.3 MB. In the first 5 days after the update it created 32,672 reports totaling 1.4 GB. Today it created 60 crash reports in 5 minutes. However it has never crashed! I turned off crash reporting and so far it seems to have stopped. I had to delete the report files to recover the hard drive space.
PCLinuxOS Phoenix 2013 Gateway Solo 5300 512 MB RAM
NOTE: I had to delete most of the printer information from the troubleshooting information to get the post under the 30,000 character limit.
All Replies (11)
It might be too late now if you cleared it, but did you look at this page to try to figure out what was in those reports:
about:crashes
It's possible that a plugin is crashing silently, i.e., it never even draws its UI, but 32,000+ reports is hard to imagine unless there is a problem in the crash reporting system itself.
Well I guess I spoke too soon, it is still creating the crash reports after turning off crash reporting. Between 7:29 PM and 7:32 PM (3 minutes) it created 424 reports totaling 15.1 MB. These are in the /home/tim/.mozilla/firefox/Crash Reports/pending/ folder so have not yet been submitted. All of the others were in the same folder. I did go to about:crashes and clicked on several but it says "Crash not found"
Tim KD7ADG
More info: I looked at the history between 7:29 and 7:32, I had been to youtube, gmail and wikipedia when the crash reports were generated.
Tim
Could you try disabling all plugins and see whether that stanches the bleeding, or whatever metaphor seems apt?
Tools menu > Addons > Plugins
I disabled each of the plug-ins one at a time. The crash reports stopped when I disabled Flash Player, unfortunately this was at the end of the list. 2647 reports in the last hour totaling 95.3 MB. Most of this time I was not using the computer.Tim KD7ADG
Flash is pretty pervasive on the web, but that level of crashes is really nuts.
On Windows, it often helps to disable hardware graphics acceleration in Firefox and in Flash.
(A) In Firefox, un-check the box here and restart:
orange Firefox button or classic Tools menu > Options > Advanced > General > "Use hardware acceleration when available"
(B) In Flash, see this support article from Adobe: http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/video-playback-issues.html#main_Solve_video_playback_issues
Hopefully someone knowledgeable about Linux will have suggestions on how to get Flash operating correctly. Until then, I did notice these alternate players which you might check out:
Hardware acceleration has no effect. I looked at the 6 error reports that did get submitted, all 6 showed libflashplayer.so. With Flash Player disabled it's no longer filling up the hard drive with thousands of crash reports but most YouTube videos will not play. So a partial fix. I'll keep researching Flash Player and looking for an alternative to Flash Player. Thanks for your help.
Tim KD7ADG
Unfortunately, Flash 11.2 is the last version of Flash for linux, so the troubleshooting you can do here is quite limited. You can however try to uninstall and reinstall Flash.
I tried uninstall and reinstall, didn't work. I tried reinstalling all of the dependencies as well, didn't help. This started when Firefox got updated to version 20. I will look for the older version of Firefox.
Tim KD7ADG
There was a newer version of Firefox available tonight, 20.0.1. OK, I tried installing that version. Re- enabled Flash and tried again. No Help. 1146 error reports totaling 41.0 MB between 9:25 PM and 9:38 PM (13 minutes). That is more than one per second! I disabled Flash again. Still looking for a complete fix.
Additional info: I installed Seamonkey (yes, I know, another Mozilla browser). The results with Flash player were the same. 210 crash reports, 7.6 MB in less than 2 minutes. I have submitted a bug report to Adobe as well.
Tim KD7ADG