[K12OSN] YouTube crashes Firefox

[William Fragakis]

In my experience, memory does seem to be a factor. As another poster
suggested, I tried boosting the nbd swap for thin clients with 128mb of
ram with video at 1280x1024 which couldn't even get out of the gate with
flash. That helped. 

I run into this much less with clients using PCI video cards (Radeon
9250). 

I also suspect that the issue may be more complex. Flash alone won't
always crash Firefox but when sound kicks in, that seems to make matters
worse. Youtube seemed more stable several months ago then suddenly got
dodgy late last fall or early in winter. I had been able to watch 30-50
minute videos with no problem but recently things would crash with the
first video loaded.

I've also had Firefox crash when loading a page that had mb's of images
(someone had several dozen hi rez images on a web page that I came
across). Every time I loaded that page - poof. The page did not have any
Flash.

regards,
William



On Sun, 2008-03-09 at 12:00 -0400, k12osn-request at redhat.com wrote:
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 09:07:02 -0800
> From: "Robert Arkiletian" <robark at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [K12OSN] YouTube crashes Firefox
> To: "Support list for open source software in schools."
>         <k12osn at redhat.com>
> Message-ID:
>         <a18d8e260803080907g43ba44bcr1fa27beb2a74d529 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 7:52 AM, Barry Cisna <brcisna at eazylivin.net>
> wrote:
> > Hello List,
> >
> >  FYI. I have Googled Firefox forums on this and no luck. Has anyone
> here
> >  figured out a good workaround for thin clients that when trying to
> view
> >  YouTube videos it crashes Firefox? I would guess on these clients 2
> out
> >  of 10 times Firefoxes crashes/closes when trying to view various
> YouTube
> >  videos.
> >  This is the Ebox2300/128mb onboard ram. We are tickled to death
> with
> >  these other than this snafoo. I have the following lines in the
> lts.conf
> >  file for these clients.:
> >  X4_MODULE_03     =  glx
> >  USE_NBD_SWAP     =   Y
> >
> >  I have tried with and without the USE_NBD_SWAP  = Y and this seems
> to
> >  make no better,no worse.( this was a suggestion in a similar
> scenario at
> >  a Firefox forum for crashes FF when viewing videos).This happens
> with
> >  both the stock FF v1.5.0 and FF v2.0.0.2 .
> 
> Hi Barry,
> I don't think it's a memory issue. In my opinion this is a flash
> issue. I have also experienced it. This is what I have noticed.
> 
> flash version 48 is more stable and uses less resources than 115,
> however it has security issues. Gnash JUST released version 0.8.2
> beta. I tried installing Gnash but was unsuccessful due to failed
> dependecies because I am still using k12ltsp 4EL. So I'm stuck using
> flash 48.
> 
> One more thing, Opera 9.26 (stable) won't work with flash 115.
> However, Opera 9.5 (beta) does support flash 115 (even 64 bit Opera
> 9.5 supports the 32 bit flash plugin). Seems Adobe built flash 115 to
> have some custom hooks for Firefox so the Opera people had to work
> around it.
> 
> Basically this whole situation continues to stink because of flash.
> It's the one non-open source code that everyone has to have. I wish
> the Gnash developers the best of luck. We are all depending on them.
> 
> Could anyone who has tried Gnash 0.8.2 beta let us know how well it
> now works?
> 
> -- 
> Robert Arkiletian
> Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada
> Fl_TeacherTool http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/Fl_TeacherTool/
> C++ GUI tutorial http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/
> 
>