Jeff, you are crashing my browsers today. Is this punishment?

[Anonymous]

Have I posted too many naughty posts this week? I'm a little on edge with the kids here 24x7. I promise I will be good if you can help me…

Today, DCUM is crashing my browsers. Safari 6.0.2 on a fairly new MacBook Air (10.7.5) and Firefox (I think a relatively up-to-date version) on an old iMac. Only DCUM. All other websites behaving nicely. Is there an ad misbehaving? Something "fixed" recently? And it will either take forever to load and then just not respond. Or the page will have loaded, but then stop responding somehow. The whole browser stops responding, even if I have 1 or 5 tabs open. Have to force it to quit.

LMK if you need any additional information. Not sure if it's happening to anyone else - haven't seen any other posts about it.

FYI - I even had to write this post in TextEdit because DCUM keeps crashing my browser if I have it open for too long trying to write this. Nothing else running except TextEdit.

Please help because it's killing me -- I might have to spend more time with my kids or something!!

[Anonymous]

Also it's off and on. At the moment everything seems fine. But when I was trying to type that all up 15 min ago it kept locking up.

[jsteele]

Humm. This is a new one for me. If you are idle while viewing the forums, a page loads in the background to refresh your session and keep it alive. One possibility is that page is causing a problem for some reason. Try this:

1) Go to the "Safari" menu and pick "Preferences..."
2) Click on "Privacy"
3) Under "Remove all Website Data", click "Details"
4) Search for dcurbanmom and click on the result (should say www.dcurbanmom.com)
5) Click "Remove".

Also, do this:

1) From the "Go" menu of the finder, select "Utilities".
2) double click to open "Terminal"
3) type "top -o cpu"
4) try to keep this visible while you surf the website
5) watch to see what rises to the top
6) If it is "PluginProcess", let me know.
7) To kill "top", type control-c or just close the terminal window and quite Terminal.

[Anonymous]

So when everything seems fine we have:


And when Safari starts to hang we have:

[Anonymous]

p.s. it's been many years since I've used top - that just made my night!

[jsteele]

So, as you can see, the issue is "PluginProcess". I am having the same problem, though my computer doesn't free completely and I've had it happen on other websites. An easy solution when PluginProcess is at 100% is to "kill -HUP pid" where pid is the number under PID in top for PluginProcess".

I suspect that it is caused by the Flash plugin, though I have turned off Flash and still had it happen. I'm still troubleshooting it and will let you know more if I figure anything out.

[Anonymous]

Great - thank you so much for looking into it! I'll make sure my Flash is up-to-date just to see if that makes a difference. And thanks for the kill command.

[Anonymous]

Hi Jeff,

I have still been having this problem off and on. I just kill the plugin process when it's misbehaving.

Today I did get a more detailed error message and thought I would share. After I killed the process, my browser (Firefox) gave me a message that the Flash plugin has crashed. And also that there was an unresponsive script:
Script: http://choices.truste.com/ca?aid=comcast01&pid=comcast01&language=en&c=_LBcLB_&cid=7548040_1408067_96374428_53742676&sid=_LBsidLB_&language=en&js=st_2&cam=3:22

Looks like it was one of the ads?

Anyway, nothing urgent, just wanted to share in case you look into it again.

Thanks!

[jsteele]

Can you please let me know if you get the script error again? If we find a trend of that site causing a problem, I can block ads from that source. BTW, while I was typing this message, I had the same issue with the PluginProcess and had to kill it.

[Anonymous]

Thanks! I did just have to kill it again, but didn't get the script error again.

[Anonymous]

another script error:
Script: http://choices.truste.com/ca?aid=aol01&pid=aol01&cid=equifaxaajan10&w=160&h=600&plc=tr&c=aol014227755654&js=2:34

[jsteele]

Truste.com is some sort of tracking service. I don't know how those scripts are getting here, but probably through the ads. One thing you can do is use a Javascript blacklist to prevent those scripts from running. I use a Safari extension called "Javascript Blacklist". The problem is the author was hosting it on Mac.com which has been taken down. You can get a copy here:

http://37prime.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/casualty-of-mobileme-closure-drew-thalers-javascript-blacklist-safari-extension/

But, I don't know if it will ever be updated. So, this might be a temporary fix. Download the extension, double-click to expand the zip archive, then double click the extension to install it. Then go to "Safari -> Preferences -> Extensions" and click on "JavaScript Blacklist". Add "truste.com" to the list of sites from which to block scripts. See if that solves the problem. I just started running Safari configured the same way to also test.

[Anonymous]

Thank you! I'll give that a try.

[Anonymous]

I am having a similar problem, I think. I notice that Flash Player plugin starts running close to 100% and then I get beachballs.

Is this the same problem? I am going to try to opt out of TrustE and see if that helps.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:I am having a similar problem, I think. I notice that Flash Player plugin starts running close to 100% and then I get beachballs.

Is this the same problem? I am going to try to opt out of TrustE and see if that helps.

Yes, I believe it is related to Flash, although we have been seeing the PluginProcess running high rather than Flash itself. Let us know if opting out of Truste works. Since I blocked Truste, I have not encountered the issue.