Re: Mozilla and Mozilla-Firefox

[Nick Holland <nick_(_at_)_holland-consulting_(_dot_)_net>]

Bashir wrote:
...
> I am running openbsd 3.6 on a laptop(i386)
>  
> I have installed both mozilla(devel package too) and mozilla-firefox hoping
> that one of them will work well in OpenBSD. But both of them are keep crashing
> as soon as I visit dynamic(middle/advanced) pages.
> 
> Anyone who have had similar problems and knows howto fix it???
...
>From what little I have figured out, it appears the crashing is not
really a crash, but a massive resource leak of some kind.  It consumes
all of something OpenBSD allocates to it, and *boom*, OpenBSD slaps it
out of existance.  It isn't memory, though if I watch the memory
consumption in 'top', it will give me a good idea when I should close
down NOW before it pukes.  I say it isn't memory, as I've done some
things (highlighting all the messages in the "junk" folder, and
accidently double clicking on 'em, thus opening a hundred or more
messages at the same time) which resulted in a memory consumption far
higher than I had ever seen (by a factor of two or three), but it did
not get shut down, so yes, it looks like there are MULTIPLE resource
leaks going on (and yes, beyond that, I have NO idea what is going on).
Different people also see different kinds of crashes: some are actually
seeing real "crash" events, where the program dies with an error
message, rather than just exiting.

If you tweek settings in /etc/login.conf for your user class, or
"promote" yourself to a higher user class, you can delay the problem for
a while.  Actually, after some serious tweeking (both putting myself in
"staff" and bumping up the limits for "staff"), Firefox runs for quite a
while (a few weeks, with several windows and many tabs per window, of
course, my browsing is probably a bit "dull" compared to that of many
others).  Mozilla (which I /stupidly/ use for e-mail) makes it only a
day or two of heavy IMAP mail useage and virtually no browsing.  At
times, I've seen its memory consumption leak by a meg of RAM or more
just by changing folders.  (It usually bombs when hitting "send" or
"spellcheck").

I've also heard form some people that they get crashes with messages,
which is probably (yet another) totally different problem, and some of
these people were surprised by my saying I was seeing "stops" without
messages..so there is something non-universal going on.  Lots of
variables: video cards, monitor resolutions, window managers,

Nick.
-- 
http://www.holland-consulting.net