SFOS Browser feezes on Stuttgarter Zeitung webseite and reboots phone

Bug Reports
1

REPRODUCIBILITY: 100%
OS VERSION: 4.5.0.24
HARDWARE: XA2 Plus
UI LANGUAGE: english
REGRESSION: do not know - i first noticed the problem after the update to 4.5 - possible that the problem existed also in ealier versions.

DESCRIPTION:

When i visit the page https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/ and browse a little bit on the page the browser
freezes sooner or later and does not react anymore on user input (neither app / nor phone). After a few seconds the phone reboots itself.

PRECONDITIONS:

None

STEPS TO REPRODUCE:

  1. Open SFOS default browser
  2. Start browsing a bit on the page https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/
  3. Sonner or later the browser freezes.

EXPECTED RESULT:

No freezing of the browser and rebooting of the phone.

ACTUAL RESULT:

Browser freezes and phone reboots.

MODIFICATIONS:

None

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

2

I tried it with 4 or 5 links there and it didn’t happen to me, but i made these modifications to the browser Browser crashing a lot since update to 4.5 - playing YouTube - #12 by Seven.of.nine and i installed privoxy, maybe one of these modifications prevents it, or both

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3

That is ONE impressive newspaper. We’ll never know the news, but they can crash a browser! Maybe the media has a purpose after all :slight_smile:

And, it crashes on .24 for me reliably, too. I think it’s the paywall. With angelfish browser (from chum) it doesn’t crash.

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4

To add one more data point: it does not freeze or reboot on the FP2 on 4.5.0.24 I tried it with (browsed the site for about 10 minutes).
Just the usual closing of the browser which happens more often on other sites.

5

Yes for me the browser also crashed sometimes on this page

6

Just adding my voice, it crashed the phone for me too.

Applying the fixes from here (thanks smatkovi) fixed it.

7

Cannot reproduce BUT I have some customization:

  • both phones use some form of swap compression:
    • PinePhone Pro uses zswap (custom)
    • Xperia 10iii uses zram (out of the box)
  • both phones use additional (custom) swap space:
    • PinePhone Pro has a swap partition on eMMC (though I will not keep this long-term).
    • Xperia 10iii has a swap partition on a “Endurance-tier” µSD.
  • I am running Defender (set to block a bunch of trackers and ads)

I noticed that the website you show eats memory like candy (close to 1GiB of crap just opening the page).

  • So it’s probably an Out-Of-Memory problem as @Seven.of.nine has reported.
  • @smatkovi 's privoxy and my use of Defender probably reduce part of the crap loaded.
  • @Seven.of.nine 's tweak to avoid OOM killer and my use of extra swap swap space probably makes me much more resilient to too much crap loaded by webpages.
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8

I have host blocks running which I assume kept the browser from completely eating all RAM AND probably led to the instability of the page. I wanted to note that it crashed the browser but NOT the whole session. On the other hand, I have had one case where Lipstick died under browser pressure. I just don’t remember the page.

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9

I am sure the blocklist definitely helps reduce the memory pressure.

Could you try a swap partition to further reduce the pressure? (preferably either on a sacrificial uSD card, or one geared for “Endurance”, “Industrial”, etc)

10

Not sure it’s swap, my 9gb of swap was barely used (went from 590mb to 604 after scrolling through whole of that page, though I might have some about:config tweaks), maybe german users get extra spying content loaded that tourists don’t get? Or do I need to click into/outo of some articles? The previous example of crashing msdn page was reliably crashing before reaching end of page
Edit: but that’s on XIII, just noticed it’s originally about XA2, so nvm
Edit2: yeah it’s pretty heavy on ram so on XA2 extra swap could help, 4.1gb ram used with that page still loaded in the background, plus 600 swap, if xa2 has same 1gb default swap 3gb might be not enough

11

Please check the link in my post.

12

I applied the blocking of ads via /etc/hosts, then the reboot no longer occurs - the situation is much better now.

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