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Seamonkey crashes frequently?



For quite a while I have been using Mozilla compiled natively from pkgsrc, with a native build of Java 1.3.1, and I have been rather satisfied. This is on a ThinkPad which I bought in january 2005 and which originally ran NetBSD 2.0.x. However, when I switched to NetBSD 3 about a year ago and installed the mplayer plugin and Java plugin (again a native Java 1.4 I compiled from sources) I started getting weird situations (not necessarily related to these plugins) where the browser would try to connect to a webserver and just lock up - windows no longer refreshed, and all you could do was kill it. Entering the same page that locked it then usually always worked the next time. I lived OK with that for a year, but now I have upgraded again. I now run
able:~ $ uname -a
NetBSD able.toft-hp.dk 4.99.4 NetBSD 4.99.4 (GENERIC) #0: Fri Nov 24 11:47:02 UTC 2006 builds%b3.netbsd.org@localhost:/home/builds/ab/HEAD/i386/200611240000Z-obj/home/builds/ab/HEAD/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC i386

and have compiled seamonkey-1.0.6 (and mplayer-plugin-seamonkey-2.70) for this from pkgsrc-current (around Nov 30). Java plugin isn't installed yet. Now, instead of occasional lock-ups, it crashes and dies promptly with a segfault. And the frequency with which this happens, seems to be just slightly greater than the lockups I had become used to. This is of course going in the wrong direction.

I wonder whether there are other NetBSD users who use native seamonkey on their machine, and who recognize this behaviour? A look in GDB (I'm not really a debugging kind of guy, typing bt is about my limit) shows this:

Core was generated by `seamonkey-bin'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
#0  0xbb1beeff in kill () from /usr/lib/libc.so.12
(gdb) bt
#0  0xbb1beeff in kill () from /usr/lib/libc.so.12
#1  0xbb1e304c in raise () from /usr/lib/libc.so.12
#2 0xb7a34e6f in nsProfileLock::FatalSignalHandler () from /usr/pkg/lib/seamonkey/components/libprofile.so
#3  0xbb281d3b in pthread_sigmask () from /usr/lib/libpthread.so.0
#4  0xbb1e0788 in swapcontext () from /usr/lib/libc.so.12
(gdb) q

I consider various options for dealing with this situation:
- revert to Mozilla 1.7.3 to get back the slightly less frequent freezing behaviour. :-) - wait and see, hope with time and new, improved (hmm?) versions of everything, it stabilizes - switch to a different native browser (but I prefer Java and movies, so only likely candidates are Firefox and perhaps Galeon, and Firefox seems to have the same problem with crashes, I'm afraid. Don't know about Galeon.) - switch to Linux-binary emulated version. (But how well does that perform? Last time I used Linux-emul I was annoyed by it because I would always somehow end up in the /emul directory when saving etc.) - install Xen and a Linux VM, running Linux Seamonkey in a separate VM. (But how well will that perform, and how often does Seamonkey crash on Linux?)

So to summarize, I'm fishing for advice on which option I should take (or other options I have missed), and opinions and experiences from other users using a setup more or less similar to mine. A solution that would work right out of pkgsrc (-wip?) is of course preferable.

(I really just wish I could have Seamonkey run each browser window as a separate process, then a crash wouldn't take out everything else I was doing at the time. An idea for a new browser, perhaps?)

-Lasse



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