637 Firefox crashes since 01/2015 - help me understand
Hello,
Firefox has been crashing intermittently for years on my Macbook Air. The problem is that it crashes seemingly randomly: not specifically when a process seems to be hanging the whole browser, nor when I do a specific action.
I've activated E10s (it was crashing before that), and I had hoped that it would stop whole-browser crahes. Instead, what I got now are two types of crashes: the whole browser or all tabs at the same time (the second one is definitely less annoying). To tell the truth I've mostly learned to live with it, but every few months I'm back to researching if some update will help my case or some add-on has been identified as the problem.
I use MacOs Sierra 10.12.15 on a 2013 Macbook Air, which is showing its age, but works mostly fine. For the past few months I've also switched from using Chrome and Firefox alongside and run 2 different profiles of Firefox (work and personal). I'm that committed to Mozilla. I also use Firefox on a beefed up Windows computer with no issue. My friend also uses Firefox on MacOs, with a similar set of extensions, and she doesn't seem to have troubles.
Thanks for your help!
My log of crashes (the latest ones are a few days old but they were pending and i submitted them today):
bp-481cd99d-328a-4807-8bce-2d62f0170728 28/07/17 12:44 bp-42a2d715-f82a-4d06-8267-1590d0170728 28/07/17 12:35 bp-75c75bf6-5b99-4124-b2e2-f6a7c0170728 28/07/17 12:34 bp-3ad1dfe7-2a00-4a53-98f1-201070170728 28/07/17 12:33 bp-75b32ee5-7649-47ac-b010-637a80170728 28/07/17 12:14 bp-abc76981-a498-4f72-be99-eaf980170728 28/07/17 12:13 bp-71985056-9831-4a5c-80cc-acd340170728 28/07/17 12:12 bp-46801549-c12a-49ad-b77d-1b4230170728 28/07/17 12:05 bp-8101f8c1-a1be-49a8-90d8-c25160170728 28/07/17 11:55 bp-9fbf8536-383a-44a5-84fe-ab58f0170728 28/07/17 11:53 bp-96d3e6f7-221c-4b5f-a167-a15280170728 28/07/17 11:48 bp-b7d36e09-be50-4588-8cd0-393541170728 28/07/17 11:33 bp-b3c125bf-bbf8-40d9-883f-f53310170727 27/07/17 15:57 bp-38588ab0-4f20-44c9-aeb2-7080b1170727 27/07/17 14:20 bp-e324040d-d02b-4cd4-a4d1-8974e1170725 25/07/17 15:07 bp-f5cf671e-3730-4bf3-a11c-91eba0170725 25/07/17 11:29 bp-1bd36869-3318-4a45-9cce-963be1170725 25/07/17 11:08 bp-6918bddc-5d3c-43b2-bfea-d06ca1170720 20/07/17 11:06 bp-debe7cfa-85eb-45da-8907-e1e341170718 18/07/17 16:39 bp-4c1d8e06-d7a8-4c6f-9706-734411170718 18/07/17 13:30 bp-0d97fb68-dc43-4d77-841a-10a931170717 17/07/17 23:15 bp-505bfc25-a3cf-49ef-9433-9b94f1170717 17/07/17 19:28 bp-3fbfd457-4090-4c62-ac04-a70fa1170714 14/07/17 12:07 bp-adad14f3-73a2-416d-bf5a-ed0161170713 13/07/17 19:40 bp-cb764186-ec5f-478c-b63e-356411170713 13/07/17 15:39 bp-8311a454-48b5-4928-b6d3-e6db51170713 13/07/17 11:36 bp-2a4c65f6-737b-497c-8768-6aa8c1170711 11/07/17 16:45 bp-eb48598d-e2cb-4d87-bd2c-c4e461170711 11/07/17 13:39 bp-53a32442-22ae-436e-a565-694791170711 11/07/17 11:03 bp-87fb1625-5bf8-4719-aa0e-dfe9e1170710 10/07/17 16:20 bp-15d49636-9b3a-4cbd-9d9c-d15511170709 10/07/17 00:00 bp-d87017f9-9c60-47ef-82d4-af9221170704 04/07/17 14:51 bp-64e02cef-cd29-427d-ac20-5259a1170704 04/07/17 11:04 bp-fc36b06b-7fbb-4521-9171-64c171170702 02/07/17 14:18 bp-6286d130-2404-46d4-ab73-68f6a0170701 02/07/17 01:05 bp-3f4b4bb0-c4b3-4356-a097-d5e3e1170701 01/07/17 14:51
(placed older reports in comment tags - c)
Wót cor-el
Wšykne wótegrona (2)
That's a lot of data, and the sequence is very difficult to follow. It's really too much for anyone to read. Here are some of the most recent Firefox 54.0.1 reports I was able to take a open having to give up. Hopefully a Mac person can look at these recent ones a little more closely
July 28th AddSelector - after about 2 days of uptime
July 27th void DispatchToTracer<T> - after about 98 minutes of uptime
July 27th <name omitted> | js::gc::detail::CellIsMarkedGrayIfKnown - after about 28 hours of uptime
July 25th nsXBLService::LoadBindingDocumentInfo - after about 3.5 hours of uptime
July 25th mozilla::dom::StreamBlobImpl::~StreamBlobImpl - after 4 days of uptime
July 25th js::DispatchTyped<T> - after nearly 4 days of uptime
I don't know how those can both be accurate in the report of previous crash time. Perhaps it's a multi-process thing?
July 24th <name omitted> | js::gc::detail::CellIsMarkedGrayIfKnown - after 4 days of uptime
July 20th ScanBlackVisitor::VisitNode - after 2 days of uptime
July 20th js::GCMarker::processMarkStackTop - after 2 days of uptime
I don't know how those can both be accurate in the report of previous crash time. Perhaps it's a multi-process thing?
July 20th pthread_mutex_lock | <name omitted> | nsTimerImpl::CancelCheckIfFiring - after about 40 hours of uptime
July 18th void DoMarking<T> - after about 8 hours of uptime
July 18th js::jit::MBasicBlock::clear - startup crash?
July 18th bool js::gc::IsAboutToBeFinalizedUnbarriered<T> - after about 18 hours uptime
July 18th mozilla::dom::PBlobParent::DestroySubtree - after about 24 hours uptime
July 17th oid DoMarking<T> - after about 3.5 hours uptime
(I give up...)
I don't know what these indicate but IPC stands for interprocess communications, so possibly problems with launching new processes since they all occurred within 6 seconds:
July 26th IPCError-browser | ShutDownKill
July 13 IPCError-browser | ShutDownKill
@jscher thanks a lot for looking at it. I didn't really expect anyone to read everything, but at least to sample a few of them to see which kind of issues come up. I personally can't make much of any of these reports.
It makes sense though to look only at the ones in the latest Firefox version, maybe I should have only shared those. Sorry for the info dump!
Hopefully someone else can make sense of the ones you sampled. I suspected at some point that it might be related to my computer being short of RAM (8Go available, often using 7+ Go) or the processor being overloaded, which would push Firefox to crash itself instead of the computer. But not only it's pure conjecture, it doesn't match with the fact that I sometimes wake my computer from sleep only to find that Firefox has crashed.
Thanks again.
Edit: one detail I can add, is that since activating E10s, I have not experienced the most maddenning type of crash: when the browser would crash right after I clicked on the button to restore tabs from a previous crash. It would sometimes do that multple times before I was able to use Firefox normally. Nowadays I can trust that I can get back on track quickly after a crash.
Wót anstapticial