Selenium Firefox randomly freezes under Debian

Question

I'm running a selenium test using Firefox-17, and it will randomly "freeze" - the window is visible but completely useless. The mouse cursor that usually shows up when you hover over a link is active over the entire firefox window, but cannot actually interact/click on the page or firefox's menus. This only happens on the Debian machine, and only with selenium. I use Firefox-28 for daily browsing, and I've never experienced any issues like this.

The code runs fine for several minutes, but then it always randomly freezes in the middle of requesting a new page. The process must then be force killed.

Things I've tried:

• Using firefox-28 - still freezes at random

• Running the same code on my Windows machine - this runs for hours with no problem

Hypothesis:

• I'm running the tests with python's multiprocessing. (For debugging purposes I've only been using one master queue that feeds to a single driver instance.)

• Could this freezing problem be related to the forking mechanism used by Linux for multiprocessing?

• Maybe somehow related to the http://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/firefox-freeze-and-dbus.html - although I have no problems accessing the bbc podcast referenced in that link

• I have other code that runs firefox with javascript disabled, and it hasn't had any issues on this Debian machine. Could this be something to do with Linux's javascript engine?

Answer 1

I finally figured out that this only occurs with javascript enabled in firefox. Fortunately, chromium doesn't have this javascript problem on the same debian system.