Re: Firefox and Thunderbird freeze system causing a reboot

[Philipp Ost]

Hi Sean,

thanks for your tips, very helpful!

Am 17.11.2024 um 18:37 schrieb Sean C. Farley:

Various things to consider:
- Run MemTest86 on your system for a few passes to make sure your memory
   is stable.  If you undervolt too much, this will fail.  However, it
   could be a sign of bad memory or not enough current to the Memory
   Controller (MC).  The highest level of XMP for my memory will knock
   the voltage of the MC to a low level causing major system instability.


I ran MemTest86 for several passes and no errors were reported. The 
machine wasn't overclocked or undervolted.



- I doubt it is the act of Firefox or Thunderbird dying that is causing
   the system to crash.  They could be tickling something to cause that
   such as a driver.


As indicated in my reply to Pete, I decided to replace the machine after 
it began exhibiting failures to boot properly after problems with the 
BIOS occured.


[...]


- Check in /var/crash for any panics.  That could be why it takes a
   couple of minutes to reboot; it is writing the panic to disk.

- Enable crash dumps in /etc/rc.conf.  See rc.conf(5) and dumpon(8) for
   information.


Crash dumps were enabled, but never got written to disk (Swap on ZFS is 
a bad idea). In any case, there wasn't any disk activity when this 
problem occured, that's what puzzled me the most.


Best
Philipp

Re: Firefox and Thunderbird freeze system causing a reboot

[Philipp Ost]

Hi Pete,

thanks for your thoughts on this. Sorry for the late reply, real life 
got in the way...


Am 07.11.2024 um 23:57 schrieb Pete Wright:
I use both firefox and thunderbird pretty heavily on my workstation 
(14.1) and laptop (current) and have not had any issues.  a couple 
thoughts though to help you debug this:


1. maybe run a memory test and check the SMART status of your disk(s). 
i've seen behavior like this with flaky hardware in the past, and both 
of those apps are extremely memory hungry


SMART data showed no errors of any kind. I also ran memtest for several 
passes and everything was good on that front as well.


2. are you getting core's after rebuilding debug builds?  if so what 
does backtrace show?


There were no core files.

3. is this a low memory system?  when i was debugging a memory leak in 
firefox a while ago i wrote a wrapper that invoked it via limits(1).


The machine had 32GB of memory installed, which should have been enough.

After the machine started complaining about changes to BIOS settings, I 
decided to go ahead an replace it. 12 years was a good run. ;-)


Best
Philipp