#67,312,645,346,567,589,342,387,656,904,578,234:
I’ve been having a number of frustrating problems with Firefox over the last few months, starting with a disturbing tendency for the browser to crash for no apparent reason on an entirely too regular basis. If it didn’t crash, it would suddenly stop being able to access websites, and cause my system to bog down until I rebooted it—after which everything would be just fine. Or, embedded streaming video might refuse to run more than two seconds, forcing me to use another browser (usually Google Chrome) to view the video.
Well, tonight I decided to defrag my two main hard drives and throw in a virus scan, and I discovered that there seemed to be some isolated disk errors—including one affecting Java. Which, reasonably, could cause trouble for web browsing.
Ran a disk scan, and then pointed my virus scanner at the folders containing the files affected by the disk errors, and now everything seems to be okay. I won’t know for a few days whether the browser crashing behavior, or the system resource trouble (neither RAM nor CPU usage, as far as any of my utilities could ever identify), are really gone, but disk errors on the boot drive are never a good thing, and they are gone.
<fingers crossed>
Update, Tuesday afternoon: So far, so good.
9:34 a.m., Wednesday: First browser crash since fixing the disk errors. We’ll see how long before the next one.
Around 10:00 p.m. Wednesday: Not a browser cache per se, but the system bogdown mentioned before, accompanying a loss of web connection. A re-check of the CPU usage showed there is actually an unaccounted-for 80-plus percent processor activity during these episodes, which I hadn’t seen before. Before rebooting I scheduled another disk check on my boot drive, and the next time I reboot there will be a scan for errors on the external drive.
Thursday afternoon: Firefox 3.02 auto-installed after a system reboot. We’ll have to see if the browser is more stable after whatever progressive disk-error problems I may be having, re-assert themselves. (I hope I’m not having progressive disk-error problems, but if I am, I need to know about it before the drive goes boom.)
