[SOLVED] firefox and thunderbird freeze

Question

Hi, since a few day I've had issues with both firefox 9 and thunderbird 9. Firefox starts normally, but whenever I touch try to open a menu it freezes. If I start ff from a terminal I don't get any error error messages it just hangs. Killing the program from the gui does not work, but I when started from the terminal ctrl-c kills it without any problems. The problem only occurs for the main toolbar, my bookmarks bar works fine, as do the home button, url bar and such. Thunderbird shows similar freezes, but they occur consistently after starting the program. I think the problems started after upgrading to version 9, but I am not entirely sure, since I don't use the laptop on which the problem occurs much for email and browsing.
I tried renaming my .mozilla folder so I could make a fresh start, but this had no effect, nor did starting firefox in safe-mode. I also tried downgrading to 8.x but then it froze on startup. Since gtk3 was updated at the same time as well, I tried downgrading that one as well, but to no effect As the program is frozen the memory and cpu use are normal.
Does anyone have any suggestions towards finding a solution?
[edit]I have two arch installations on this laptop and just tried updating the other (somewhat neglected) install. In this one all works fine.I'm trying to go over the differences between the two now.[/edit]
Last edited by FreeTheBee (2011-12-28 11:27:29)

Answer 1

The output is mostly gibberish to me but it did help
When I click a menu button in firefox the output of strace turned into a seemingly endless loop of the following
readlink("/home/patrick/.pulse/6d395381881edc62e30ef1dc0000052a-runtime", "/tmp/pulse-PKdhtXMmr18n"..., 99) = 23
lstat64("/tmp/pulse-PKdhtXMmr18n", 0xbfe89d70) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
umask(077) = 022
mkdir("/tmp/pulse-BtWOtBrBLg7x", 0700) = 0
umask(022) = 077
symlink("/tmp/pulse-BtWOtBrBLg7x", "/home/patrick/.pulse/6d395381881edc62e30ef1dc0000052a-runtime.tmp") = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
rmdir("/tmp/pulse-BtWOtBrBLg7x") = 0
nanosleep({0, 10000000}, NULL) = 0
readlink("/home/patrick/.pulse/6d395381881edc62e30ef1dc0000052a-runtime", "/tmp/pulse-PKdhtXMmr18n"..., 99) = 23
lstat64("/tmp/pulse-PKdhtXMmr18n", 0xbfe89d70) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
umask(077) = 022
mkdir("/tmp/pulse-OHwEwCYtPIhw", 0700) = 0
umask(022) = 077
symlink("/tmp/pulse-OHwEwCYtPIhw", "/home/patrick/.pulse/6d395381881edc62e30ef1dc0000052a-runtime.tmp") = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
rmdir("/tmp/pulse-OHwEwCYtPIhw") = 0
nanosleep({0, 10000000}, ^C <unfinished ...>
I assumed the .pulse folder is related to pulseaudio, because of the name and the contents, so I uninstalled pulseaudio and friends and deleted the ~/.pulse folder. Now firefox and thunderbird work again as they should. And as a bonus spotify finally works again as well. Pulseaudio has been giving me a headache on this laptop but I don't understand why it interfered with firefox.
Thanks for helping out.
If the glibc problem turns out to persist I can undo the solved tag ofc.
Last edited by FreeTheBee (2011-12-28 11:28:44)