annoying random Firefox crash - how to debug?

[SoftDux]

Hi,

My firefox (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091216 Fedora/3.5.6-1.fc11 Firefox/3.5.6) on Gnome 2.26.3 will randomly crash, without any errors. /var/log/messages & /var/log/Xorg.0.log doesn't show anything that caused any errors. And it doesn't matter on which website(s) I'm busy with, it will just crash.

Does anyone know how to check for a problem?

My PC has:

Intel Pentium(R) Dual-Core E5200 CPU
4GB DDRII Corsair RAM
3x 160GB SATAII HDD
Asus Nvidia 8800GT graphics card.


I have updated to the latest nVidia drivers

[root@Rudi-PC ~]# dmesg | grep nvidia
nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
nvidia 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
nvidia-config-d[1399]: segfault at 7f0888000000 ip 0000003ff107bf54 sp 00007ffff39d1898 error 4 in libc-2.10.2.so[3ff1000000+164000]


[root@Rudi-PC ~]# dmesg | grep nvidia
nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
nvidia 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
nvidia-config-d[1399]: segfault at 7f0888000000 ip 0000003ff107bf54 sp 00007ffff39d1898 error 4 in libc-2.10.2.so[3ff1000000+164000]

[root@Rudi-PC ~]# uname -a
Linux Rudi-PC 2.6.30.10-105.2.23.fc11.x86_64 #1 SMP Thu Feb 11 07:06:34 UTC 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux



This is on Fedora Core 12 x86


I have disabled the only 3 Firefox plug-ins that I installed yesterday, but this problem has been looming for a long time.

Something interesting that I picked up is that Thunderbird will close randomly (very seldom though) as well, so I don't know if it's Firefox specific though.

I have picked up that it happens more often when my PC's memory usage is above 2GB RAM, and memtest86+ didn't indicate any memory problems. If I have less tabs open, it happens less often, but the more tabs I have open, the more often it happens.


At the same time, on the same PC, when I'm in Windows XP SP3 (dual boot), I can have many more tabs open as well as Thunderbird, Quickbooks, Photoshop CS3 and some other applications, and it doesn't cash.

[madhavdiwan]

Any chance you are looking at flash when it happens?

Typing

aboutlugins

in the firefox URL bar will let you know if you are running flash from adobe ( libflashplayer).

The crash issue you have described is common if the issue happens when you are browsing a flash enabled site.

if it happen without flash.. you might try uninstalling it ( yum remove firefox ), removing all or your plugins from /usr/lib(lib64)/mozilla/plugins and reinstalling

[hephasteus]

Update to 3.5.8 got pushed a few days ago. Probably go out in a couple more days.