Re: Workaround for Firefox crashiness

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Wed, 30 Jan 2008 12:31:58 -0500
"Jared D. McNeill" <jmcneill%invisible.ca@localhost> wrote:

> Heyas folks --
> 
> If anybody has been annoyed like I have been about Firefox crashing
> frequently with many tabs/windows open, I've found a workaround after
> digging through a 70MB ktrace.
> 
> Basically, firefox runs out of file descriptors and freaks out. Maybe
> it's a side effect of having lots of fonts installing from pkgsrc,
> I'm not sure. In any case, bumping openfiles before launching firefox
> has made the problem disappear for me.
> 
> ksh:
>   $ ulimit -n 512
>   $ firefox
> 
> or login.conf:
> 
>   default:\
>       :openfiles-cur=512:
> 
> Has made things work much smoother for me.
> 
There are also memory leaks that eventually kill it, but with a much
longer time constant unless you download huge pages.

But yes, increasing the number of file descriptors is a very good
idea.  I had to do it to keep acroread happy, too.  For it, the number
of shared libraries seemed to be the issue.


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb