These problems are most probably related to the Leap Second Problem that affects many servers worldwide since Saturday. I had problems with my servers during the last couple of days, and so did my customers.
These problems are most probably related to the Leap Second Problem that affects many servers worldwide since Saturday. I had problems with my servers during the last couple of days, and so did my customers.
Google for "Leap Second Problem Firefox". You wil find quite a few results that tell you that Firefox was badly affected. Chrome is running in a sandbox and did not have such problems. Some quotes:
Which programs were left exposed? Anything with a Java component plus MySQL, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Debian, the latter causing server blades to ‘go dark’.
Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, also had problems.
"Java is choking on leap second," said Mozilla engineer Eric Ziegenhorn, who noted that some services using the Java software platform were malfunctioning.
Firefox was suddenly taking up a lot of CPU power showing nothing but a blank webpage, on all four computers. Closing and re-opening Firefox didn’t fix it, logging out and back in didn’t fix it, but rebooting the machines did.
Some google searching indicates that there was a problem with Firefox using a futex that got confused by the leap second, and getting into a loop.
Must be just a Linux thing as Windows API has something similar to the "leap smear" thing it mentioned google uses. A lot of servers use it when their time is off to insert or remove fractions of a second over time and get things back in sync.