The turned off JEMALLOC seems to cause problems

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

I'm the maintainer of Debian's conkeror package[1]. Conkeror[2] is a
web browser built as XULRunner application.

  [1] http://packages.debian.org/conkeror
  [2] http://conkeror.org/

In the #conkeror IRC channel we currently have the problem that for
two people running conkeror on Sid (i386 and amd64) conkeror freezes
quite often -- even on the starting paged, so it's close to being
reproducable -- if and only if MOZILLA_NO_JEMALLOC is set to 1 as it's
done by default in Debian's xulrunner-1.9 since 1.9.0.3-1. Setting
MOZILLA_NO_JEMALLOC=0 solves the problem.

It happens with both current upstream version from git as well as with
the version in Lenny/Sid.

OTOH neither me nor another Debian Lenny user can reproduce these
problems at all. I use Conkeror daily on Lenny i386/amd64 and every
few days also on Sid i386/amd64 since months without such problems.

I remember that MOZILLA_NO_JEMALLOC=1 solved a bunch of problems (e.g.
http://bugs.debian.org/490360) so I'm quite surprised to hear that it
now _causes_ stability problems.

I first thought it might be a pango-graphite related problem (like
e.g. http://bugs.debian.org/498258), but pango-graphite has been added
as conflicting since 1.9.0.5-1 because of those problems. But since we
have (again) such blatant differences in stability I really expect
this problem being caused by the existence or non-existance of some
other package or config on the machine where it crashes.

Any ideas what else could make such a difference in stability?

Cc to David Spreen who is currently able to reproduce the problems
quite reliably. I would be happy if someone has some hints for us
where to start with backtracing this problem.

David: Please correct me if I got anything wrong. :-)

		Regards, Axel
-- 
Axel Beckert - abe at deuxchevaux.org, abe at noone.org - http://noone.org/abe/