Mea Culpa

by Bryan

5 comments

1 Mustang Bobby { 11.02.10 at 2:34 pm }

We’re seriously considering a new platform and hence a new commenting system. JS-Kit has done nothing but suck dry green donkey hooters since the day we started using it. I think they must be owned by Comcast.

2 Bryan { 11.02.10 at 3:27 pm }

The weird thing is, I use it on OWL’s blog without problem, but at your place it just goes into a loop, and I can’t break out without shutting down. I have no idea why it is accessing my system, but my modem [DSL] goes crazy.

3 Badtux { 11.02.10 at 9:45 pm }

That’s the time when you stick a Linux router in the middle and snoop the traffic. If you don’t want to re-work your network architecture, just stick a machine with two network cards in the middle and bridge them with brctl. http://confessionsofalinuxpenguin.blogspot.com/2010/10/setting-up-bridging-and-vlans-in-fedora.html for an example with Fedora 13 (but works with everything back to RHEL4/Fedora 6 — doesn’t work with earlier ones tho). Then you just use wireshark, tcpdump, or whatever to snoop on br0.

My guess is that you’re running a leaky old browser and going into a JavaScript loop that’s consuming every byte of memory in the system and throwing it into the Thrash of Death. Unfortunately I can’t tell you to go to Linux to avoid that, because Linux is just as prone to the Thrash of Death as Windows, though the OOM killer *sometimes* manages to eventually kill the browser before the whole system croaks. FreeBSD has much better OOM behavior than Linux or Windows, alas, it also is ridiculously hard to administer and doesn’t have drivers for a lot of modern hardware. So anyhow, what *does* work is going to Google Chrome… when they rewrote the universe from scratch, somehow (I don’t know how) they dealt with the looping and memory leaks and such that JavaScript is prone to. Or JS-Kit could fix their bugs. Good luck on that…

– Badtux the Geeky Penguin

4 Bryan { 11.02.10 at 10:25 pm }

I would dump this Wintel box in a flash if my remaining clients would just go along, but I am a slave to their decisions.

Yeah, it has to be a Javascript loop, and Firefox has not reacted well to them in the past, which is why I have pretty much eliminated all of the Javascript loops that I once ran as widgets on the page.

Another problem may be that it is looking for a cookie, and I am really restrictive on cookies that I accept, and dump them every time I shut down. If it is attempting to write a cookie, it will SOL, although FF normally flags that.

It has to be a combination of scripts, because the problem only exists on Bark Bark Woof Woof, I comment at other Echo/JS-Kit sites with no problems.

There are too many people who write software that doesn’t “play well with others”, and I long for the days when I was a Sys Admin in academia and ruled everything on my network [Unix on a PDP-11].

5 Badtux { 11.02.10 at 11:07 pm }

FireFox is a collection of memory leaks connected by security breaches when it doesn’t outright freeze altogether, and has managed to be the only browser on my systems (Linux, Mac, Windows) that is even poorer in quality than Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. The only time I fire up FireFox nowdays is when I want to browse some sketchy sites using Tor, Torbutton works so much more conveniently than manually pointing your browser at the Tor proxy, and even there it’s the “embedded” Firefox that I use, not the one installed in the Start menu. If it were not for my iPhone, I’d use Google Chrome everywhere — it doesn’t leak memory, and endless loops just tie up one tab, not the whole friggin’ browser. My congratulations to the Mozilla.org team for creating the only browser on the whole friggin’ planet that’s less reliable than the latest version of Microsoft Internet Exploder, hasta la vista, Firebabies…

– Badtux the “Open source crap is *still* crap” Penguin