digital bypass

This morning, I was working in Firefox on my Linux machine. I had dozen upon dozens of tabs open, I wouldn't be surprised if it numbered close to one-hundred. Well, The Fox has always had a memory leak problem, and even though it's much better these days, there are some things that just cause the browser to balloon, such as flash animations (I've noticed this problem in Windows, Linux and Mac OS versions of Firefox). Well, I was too determined to finish my research to allow a little memory leak to stop me. I was keeping an eye on it, and even though my RAM was maxed out (both the 1.0 GB of RAM and 1.0 GB of swap), I keep trudging on, closing other applications each time my memory (both RAM and swap) got above 95% utilization.

Then ForecastFox attempted to update. Firefox had trapped both my keyboard and my mouse into the browser itself, CTRL + ALT + F1 didn't switch me to terminal, CTRL + ESC didn't bring up KDE System Guard, and worst off, CTRL + ALT + ESC didn't bring up xkill. I was in a bind. I let the PC sit there for a good fifteen minutes... No go.

Then I got an idea... If I could remote in, I could get KDE System Guard up and kill Firefox. I did have the system set up for VNC, so I grabbed my MacBook and attempted to log in; however I couldn't remember what port VNC was on! I was debating on spending time looking the information up on the Internet or just power cycling my system after 65 days... I decided to do neither. All of a sudden, while trying to remember which port VNC was on, I though, I bet I can SSH into Suzi-LNX... But I'll have to get an SSH capable client for Mac OS X.... or is it built in?

HA! It was. I just opened terminal and typed SSH and Suzi's IP address and I was off! I was able to log in and I executed the top command, which lists all the processes on the system (currently Suzi), and noticed that Firefox had indeed maxed out the RAM and swap, taking up over 1.6 GB of memory, when it should never come to that. I immediately killed the PID for Firefox, and turned to see Firefox close on Suzi and the system behaving normally again! Needless to say, I was happy.

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I would like to note that this was a combined fault... Firefox shouldn't have bloated like that, but I also shouldn't have been attempting to work with so many tabs open. Also, there was some tabs with active flash animations going on, which is the frequent cause of Firefox maxing out both RAM and CPU.