Browsers + VSCode crashing - Brave and Firefox

User Support General
1

I’ve been experiencing browser crashes across Brave and Firefox-ESR when I’m using memory-intensive webapps. My general flow is something like:

  • working in browser, opening tabs

  • when in Brave, after “a while” new tabs start opening and crashing immediately (Can't open this page error, screenshot attached)

  • usually, within a few minutes of the Can't open this page starting to pop up, the entire Brave process will crash, and all open Brave browsers will disappear.

  • When I have several apps running (DataGrip, Brave, VSCode), after Brave crashes, VSCode will usually encounter an error and also crash

  • I’ve had the dev tools open in the browser when the issue starts popping up - when I start seeing the Can't open this page, and the error console is full of errors like: Failed to load resource: net::ERR_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES

  • The qube itself seems stable - it has never crashed, nor has the hypervisor (from what I can tell)

I’ve been running QubesOS for about 4 months now, and I’ve been experiencing this problem for the time I’ve been using QubesOS. Generally speaking, I’ll restart the qube and I’ll have a few hours before it starts happening again. Prior to using QubesOS I was running Debian for several years on the same hardware and did not experience this issue.

The qube is a Standalone VM, although I’ve experienced this same issue in normal and disposable qubes as well. In the standalone vm, I have 40GB of RAM set to the VM.

I’m not sure how to capture better debugging information or what my next steps should be. Any ideas where I can start? I’ve been loving QubesOS, but this problem is quite impactful.

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2

Are you using a K model 13th or 14th gen Intel CPU?

3

I have the same issue when browser in the qube don’t have enough RAM. But since you’re saying that you have 40 GB of RAM in the qube but the browser there is still crashing then maybe it’s something else.
Did you check the memory usage in the qube when you encounter this issue with crashed tabs in the browser?
Do you have memory balancing enabled for the qube?
Maybe memory balancing is not fast enough to get the memory for the qube or maybe it can’t get any more free RAM for the qube and the qube don’t have the maximum of 40 GB assigned to it but much lower e.g. 4 GB.
You can try to disable memory balancing for a test.

4

12th gen K-model:

model name : 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700K

5

I have - there’s usually 10-20GB of memory free according to htop/top, I haven’t really hit the ceiling for memory in this qube.

I do not. I have the initial memory set to 40960, max memory is grayed out and a value of 40960, and include in memory balancing is not checked.

Initially I did have memory balancing enabled, but I disabled it a few weeks ago and sadly the problem persists

6

I was reviewing the qube settings and realized I’ve pretty heavily over-allocated vCPUs between the qube in question and the other qubes that are running. Any thoughts if this could have a negative impact?

I’m going to stop some qubes and adjust my vCPU allocation and see what happens just in case

7

I’m using a 13900K with the stability issue, and I was having the same issues.

The hypervisor or qubes didn’t crash, but applications crashed all the time, both Firefox and Brave were crashing constantly.

I don’t think your CPU has the same flaw, but it could still be a heat issue, most motherboard manufacturers over tune the default settings quite hard.

Enabling all over/under voltage, current, and thermal protection in firmware fixed it for me. I also adjusted the AC/DC load line values and decreased the long duration boost value.

You could try the same, set the power settings to the Intel defaults, and see if that solves the issue.

8

Increasing kernel.threads-max to at least 10x the current value may help

9

Thank you - I’m giving this a go

10

Thank you! I haven’t tinkered around with voltage settings at all, but I’ll give this a go and see what happens

11

Try setting initial memory for virtutal machine to the high value for example 8GB, then it works for me. So maximal value will be much higher, but that wont be reached. I think there is some problem with memory balooning, which manifest itself with above mentioned programs, as it is same for me. But that initial memory “workaround” helped me. Of course if you have lot of tabs opened in browser, it will fail anyway, but this condition manifest for me with high CPU consumption and probably high disk swapping. Overall when memory is full new tab wont be loaded and virtual machine is unresponsive. All I can do is to kill it and start again, restoring tabs. EDIT: I see you disabled memory balancing, and having set up high initial memory and it still did not help to workaround this bug. I would be interested to know how much is this problem widespread, as it is quite substantial.