Run firefox avoiding system crashes - are there better ways?

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1

If I run firefox unrestrected that crashes my system from time to time. I’ve been using the systemd-run command to run firefox whilst maintaining system stability like so:

systemd-run --scope -p MemoryLimit=20000M firefox &

I’d like to get some advice or suggestions of any better ways to do this and also the best way to automate it so that it happens even if I just click on the Firefox icon.

If I run Firefox in my default way then regularly, after some time, I run out of memory. This can cause multiple issues:

  • firefox locks up for a time and then recovers
  • The GUI locks up for some time but then recovers (recovery after over 1/2 hour has happened)
  • firefox locks up and crashes
  • X locks up for a long time and crashes, logging me out
  • the system as a whole locks up for too long (I’ve tested up to 10 hours)

If I run in a cgroup with systemd-run like above, then I still have the problem that Firefox occasionally crashes, but when it does so at least the system seems to survive and so I can just restart Firefox. The cause of the crash when cgroups is active seems to be that firefox calculates memory usage in a way that is not cgroups friendly, using meminfo

I’d like to know if there’s a better way to protect the system against Firefox excessive memory usage and, also, as I said before, how to ensure this happens automatically.

2

I have a firefox bug open which describes the problems when running without memory limits. Information that might help that get fixed also appreciated.

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3

I’d like to get some advice or suggestions of any better ways to do this and also the best way to automate it so that it happens even if I just click on the Firefox icon.

You can always create a .desktop file for firefox with an Exec key that uses your wrapper.

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4

Thanks, it’s a good suggestion to get around the automation and I found some examples of configuring it in the configuration.nix so it can be pretty useful, but it doesn’t solve the issue that the oom-killer kills the wrong process in firefox.

One idea seems to be the OOMPolicy which sysetmd supports. You can set it on a normal service, but what I don’t understand is how to set the OOMPolicy when a user is running from systemd-run (if that’s possible).

5

systemd-run accepts arbitrary properties via -p, see the man pages for details. So anything you can set for a service you can use, including things like ManagedOOMSwap=kill. I have not spent that much time with oomd etc, but it seems like from man systems.resource-control that’s the first step to getting oomd to care specifically about a given cgroup.

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