f8: PC dies while using firefox

[Renich Bon Ciric]

On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 19:21 +0530, Manish Kathuria wrote:
> Okay a similar thing has happened with me twice recently. I left my
> laptop running F8 ( 2.6.24.4-64.fc8 x86_64 kernel)  on with Firefox,
> with multiple sites opened, Evolution and maybe some small
> applications
> like a xterm. When I came back after 4-5 hours, I found that the
> system
> was frozen and I could not access it either through the GUI where I
> was
> working or through any of the consoles. None of the keys or key
> combinations were working. I could ping it from the other system but
> could not access it through SSH also and was forced to switch off the
> power and reboot it.
> 
> In the both the instances, after rebooting the system I examined the
> system monitoring graphs I generate using a program called systemgraph
> and discovered that over a 3 hour period:
> 
> 1. The physical memory used increased to 2414 MB out of a total of
> 2508
> MB (as shown by free command). I have 2.5 GB of RAM installed.
> 
> 2. The swap used had increased to 1999.32 MB against the available
> swap
> space of 2047MB.
> 
> 3. The CPU context switches had increased to a maximum of about 54,000
> per second as compared to the average of about 4500-5000. Similarly
> the
> pages in and out had increased to about 1700 and 2300 per second
> against
> the average values between 20-30 per second.
> 
> 4. The disk I/O also showed a 100 times increase and the load average
> also increased manifold
> 
> 5. However, there was no significant change in number of processes or
> number of open files.
> 
> I tried to find out if there was any data regarding resource
> utilization
> by various processes during this period but could not find any and
> therefore I was unable to pinpoint the cause and was suspecting some
> kernel bug. But looking at your mail, I think it could be firefox
> which
> is causing the problem. However, no idea why. Maybe someone can
> explain
> this.
> 
> --
> Manish

Thanks for the great contribution. Ok, our theories point to:
- Firefox bug
- Kernel bug

I discarded the kernel because this happens when I use the pre-installed
and the most recent kernel. This didn't happen when I installed fedora
8, when it was released... so, that's why.

I'll keep on reading and see what others think.

Thank you soo much.
-- 
Renich Bon Ciric <renich at woralelandia.com>
Woralelandia
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