[NCLUG] Netscape Instability

S. Luke Jones luke at sixthdimension.com
Mon Nov 20 15:02:23 MST 2000


On Mon, Nov 20, 2000 at 08:55:38PM +0000, dobbster wrote:
> The problem is simple: Every once in a while, Netscape Communicator
> freezes up on me while I am browsing the web, and I have to kill it.  I
> can't see any consistency to this behavior; it almost appears random. 
> I've tried different versions of Netscape 4.6-4.7 but they all seem to
> have this problem.  I've also tried different kernels/distributions,
> based on either Redhat 5.2-6.2 or Mandrake 6/7.  The behavior is the
> same, even on "out of the box" configured distributions.  Occasionally
> the X server itself seems to lock up and I have to ctrl+alt+backspace.
> 
> It appears the problem has something to do with ld-linux.so.2, which is
> presumably a shared library used by Netscape.  I also wonder if it has
> something to do with DNS lookups.  Honestly, though, I have no clue.

Netscape has done more to teach newbies about using "ps" to find
what process to kill than any other application. I like
	ps xo "%p %a"
myself. :-)

In my experience you fix freezing-up behavior by killing off "dns helper".
Often (mostly) dns helper isn't around any more to kill so you just kill
off all the processes with a netscape in their name. But you have to kill
them all before starting netscape again, or it will lock back up.

Someone on this list planted the idea in my mind once that the problem
is in fact in the doing of DNS lookups. If you're like me and always have
a couple of browser windows around, you will superstitiously wait for one
to start loading content (i.e. get done looking up) before you click a
link in the second one.

Turning off java is a given. I'd turn off javascript too, but for some
inexplicable reason if you do that, you also lose CSS support(!!).

I tried the netscape 6 download the other day but twernt no good for me.
The netscape launcher script calls another one (run_mozilla.sh or some
such name) and then it dumps core. So I'll wait for KRUD to include a
2.0 version of the KDE Konquerer. Or the Gnome Whatever-the-heck.

Luke



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