Odd bug in firefox

[John Abreau]

Maybe Firefox grabs an exclusive lock on files when it
reads them, but blindly assumes no other process will
ever touch them, and does no error checking after
trying to lock a file.



Laura Conrad wrote:
> I have just found a workaround for a really annoying bug in firefox
> 3.0.3 on Ubuntu 8.04.  I intend to report the bug, now that I can say
> something more illuminating than "firefox crashes on me all the time",
> but I might be able to write a better bug report if I understood what
> was going on better.
>
> The observation that enabled me to find the workaround was that it never
> happened on the laptop, but happened all the time on the desktop.  The
> odd thing about the crashes was that they generally happened  when I
> wasn't at the computer at all.  But they were routinely happening
> several times a day.  Then last night it happened when I was actually
> there, and I realized that what was also happening at that time was my
> rsync to the external drive for my backup.
>
> So I excluded .mozilla/firefox in my home directory from the backup this
> morning, and sure enough, it hasn't crashed since then.  
>
> I understand that firefox is using lots of files in that directory, but
> does anyone have a theory why it should matter if the files are also being
> copied by rsync?
>
>   

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John Abreau
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