[K12OSN] Crashing Firefox on terminal in new un-messed with install

[Petre Scheie]

I wonder if this explains why one of my quite-reliable-on-4.2.1 clients, 
a Celeron with on-board S3 video consuming 32MB (out of 768MB total), 
for which Knoppix uses the XFree86(Savage) X server, breaks with 5.0.0. 
  It boots, and X starts, but the login screen is a bit 'mangled' and 
the mouse doesn't work, and it's basically dead in the water.  I'm not 
sure if it's a FC5 issue or LTSP.

Petre

Jim McQuillan wrote:
> Jim,
> 
> LTSP-4.2 has some code in it that limits the amount of memory the X-server
> is allowed to use.
> 
> Client applications, like firefox are constantly asking the Xserver to
> allocate memory, to store things like pixbufs (images) and fonts.
> 
> In the past, the xserver would just happily go along and allocate as much
> memory as it possibly could, until it uses up ALL memory, and the kernel
> would come along and start killing things, to free up some space.  Almost
> always, the Xserver would get killed, causing you to lose your session.
> 
> Now, with the mechanism that we use to tell the Xserver how much memory
> it's allowed to allocate, it will stop BEFORE the kernel kills it.
> 
> Unfortunately, client applications don't respond very well to the Xserver
> refusing to allocate memory.
> 
> In LTSP-4.2, we default to allowing the Xserver to grab 90% of the free
> memory.  You can tune it by setting 'XRAMPERC = xx', where 'xx' is the
> percentage of free memory that you want to allow the Xserver to use.
> 
> To restore the old behaviour from pre-4.2, you can set XRAMPERC = 100
> and it will allow the Xserver to grab ALL available memory.
> 
> THat additional 10% will probably help out quite a bit.
> 
> The other thing you can do is increase the amount of available ram, by
> either adding more physical ram, OR, enabling swap over NBD.
> 
> I'm not sure if Eric is including ltspswapd.  If he's not, i'll encourage
> him to add it, and probably start it by default.
> 
> As for documentation on using swap over NBD, I know Scott Balneaves has
> been working on writing something up, but I don't know if he's finished
> that.
> 
> Hope that looooong explanation helps,
> 
> Jim McQuillan
> jam at Ltsp.org
> 
> On Fri, April 7, 2006 6:57 pm, Jim Christiansen wrote:
> 
>>I wish it wasn't Friday afternoon...  I'll miss all of you guys for the
>>weekend!
>>
>>I've redone the install on my home test server of the new FC5 with Eric's
>>new ltsp packages to confirm my troubles.  What happens on a client is
>>that
>>when even called by root, Firefox on certain pages (many) will crash with
>>the following message in a console:
>>
>>[root at christiansens ~]# /opt/firefox/firefox
>>The program 'firefox-bin' received an X Window System error.
>>This probably reflects a bug in the program.
>>The error was 'BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)'.
>>  (Details: serial 42238 error_code 11 request_code 53 minor_code 0)
>>  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
>>   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
>>   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
>>   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
>>   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error()
>>function.)
>>
>>On the server, the same webpage loads.  This page is nothing compliated on
>>many of the crashing pages and this one is served off of my webserver.
>>The
>>example crashing page is a large image.  Other pages that crash die so
>>fast
>>I don't even know what is on them...
>>
>>I should have checked on the server to see how how the crashing webpages
>>behaved days ago... This is my third install and I figured I was messing
>>things up with plugins as all of the libraries may have been mixed up
>>between 32 and 64 bit versions- but I guess this isn't the case.  Firefox
>>dies even without any plugins installed.  No Acroread, java or flash...no
>>audio, xine libs, mplayer plugins... nothing extra.
>>
>>Any ideas appreciated!!  Fire away  :-)
>>
>>Thanks,  Jim
>>
>>
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> 
> 
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