I submitted the following question to comp.os.linux.x, and found I'm not the only person to experience this: I've been having a problem with Netscape crashing using versions 4.08/4.51/4.6 and 4.61, usually on pages with forms. This doesn't appear to be Java or javascript problem, nor does the fontpath fix for RH6 solve the problem. This problems shows itself most often with the 'composition' form for hotmail. Netscape appears to use more and more memory, causing the computer to thrash on the HD, making it virtually impossible to use the keyboard, to open a new terminal, or to login at another prompt to kill Netscape. Sometimes I can login over the network and kill it remotely, and sometimes not. Top shows netscape eating more and more memory. It almost always results in my waiting for 15 minutes and then forcibly rebooting. If I allow it continue, it will (eventually) crash netscape. My configuration: Redhat 6 (glibc 2.1) 2.2.7 Kernel (not the RH kernel - the 'normal' kernel configured and built for this system) Gnome (latest RPMS) Enlightenment Abit BH6 / Celeron 300a (Yes, overclocked, but that's not the problem! :) ) 64M SDRAM Riva TNT (using XF86SVGA) XFree86 3.3.3.1 Just to make things more complicated: I've had this problem with other WMs, including Afterstep. As I said above, this doesn't seem to be a Java problem. (I don't even think some of the pages involved use javascript.) It is intermittent -- It happens at least once a week, but not every time you go to these pages. I got the following responses from others in the comp.os.linux.x newsgroup: "For what it's worth, I have _exactly_ the same behavior, although on my system the disk thrashing is almost inevitable (rather than intermittent) since I run with 32 MB of RAM and an equivalent amount of swap. And like you, I had this problem with 5.2 as well. And like your wife, the worst culprit is definitely the Hotmail composition page! " "I wonder whether your problem is caused by your window manager. I tried RedHat 5.2 on a Sparc machine. It behaved just like you described. After I switched to a lesser resources demanding window manager, all of the crashing are gone. I am using Blackbox as my wm now."
I am in the habit of running top just to see if there are any netscape processes running eating a lot of cpu. They can only be killed with -9. It seems to happen less often with 4.61, and on pages with java that have been cached and visited before. www.freshmeat.net uses to always shut down netscape, but not these days.
I ran Netscape 4.61 w/ strace, and artificially 'forced' a crash -- I went into the hotmail composition and held down serveral keys until I had a long (but not excessive) message and it crashed. I have both a core file and a copy of the strace output. Netscape didn't act exactly as it does normally with this problem: this time it crashed (and took X down with it) relatively quickly, while normally it eats more and more memory, making it impossible to even to type, to get a terminal to kill it, or do anything else, but takes as long as 30 minutes to completely crash before returning control to the user. Gzipd the core and strace are about 140K -- should I send them somewhere? where? David
I have also seem this problem on 3 machines: RH6.0, i386 gnome+enlightenment (various versions, stock to latest stable) netscape 4.6,4.51 problem is not consistently reproducable, but seems to occur on long form pages after using pull-down menu - can no longer enter text after this occurs. The previous two submitters seem much more knowlegable, but I'll be glad to provide more information, if useful. Scott
submitted to netscape; they will have to provide a fix. Meanwhile, you might try running as: LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/i386-glibc20-linux/lib \ /usr/i386-glibc20-linux/lib/ld-linux.so.2 \ /usr/lib/netscape/netscape-communicator
I have the same problem with RH6.0, icewm(very small window manager) and Netscape Communicator 4.6. Is it just a netscape mistake?