Debugging a freeze on Chrome 132

[Neal Fultz]

My extension lets users view and search large sets of (eg >5k) bookmarks. It has worked fine for several years, but after updating to version 132 (linux), the page freezes - the scroll bar doesn't work, can't click on anything. The debugging tools / console become non-responsive, both for the extension page and the service worker. After a minute the Wait / Kill popup appears.

If I set the main div to display:none, then I can see all the data populating correctly in the inspector view of the document tree. But flipping it to be visible causes the tab to freeze.

There error doesn't occur with somewhat smaller data sets (~ 2k bookmarks). My workstation has plenty of memory free when I check in htop.

The extension does still works fine on 131 (CrOS). Haven't tried on Win or Mac yet.

I guess my questions are:

* How am I supposed to debug this type of error? The built in tools aren't working.

* Was there something in 132 release notes I missed that would require me to change something?

[Oliver Dunk]

Hi Neal,

Thanks so much for sharing this. I can't immediately think of a related change, but it does seem surprising.

If you're able to share any steps to reproduce, that would be really helpful.

If you'd like to spend more time investigating this, my next step would be the bisect tool: https://www.chromium.org/developers/bisect-builds-py/. This allows you to try a number of builds between two milestones and identify a reasonably short list of commits that might have caused the problem.

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

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[Neal Fultz]

Oliver,

thanks for your suggestion.

I have made slightly more progress debugging this. It appears that disabling favicons on the bookmarks allows the extension page to display normally (sub-100ms for 6k bookmarks), but it immediately crashes when favicons are re-enabled.

Because favicons are an extension-specific feature, I can't just dump out some HTML and post it for other people to test with. Instead, I guess they would have to install my extension and load some bookmarks. It triggers when there are around 2k bookmarks plus or minus.

I am accessing the Mv3 Extension Favicon API via CSS - see here https://github.com/njnmco/odinochka/blob/master/odinochka.js#L451-L452 - and setting them as a background image next to the links. This had worked fine for three years according to git log.

Any other ideas for fixing this or maybe a workaround?

- Neal

[Neal Fultz]

More debugging - I had an old HP Chromebook 11 that needed updates anyway, I see my extension worked correctly on CrOS 124, 129, and 132. Using the bisect tool on my linux desktop, I also see it breaking on Linux 64 129, 131, 132, although unfortunately the tool doesn't print out any error logs as far as I can tell. So I am starting to think this is either a linux-build chrome extension issue, or something changed in debian/ubuntu space that my extension has triggered, or an interaction between the two. :(

[Oliver Dunk]

Hi Neal,

Thanks for taking the time to run the bisect. I know those are time consuming :)

Do you happen to have the output saved? Unless it fails to find the change, it will usually end up with something like "Regression was added between these changes: <link>".

To confirm, you're seeing this on Linux and ChromeOS, right? Have you been able to try Windows or macOS by any chance?

A sample extension would be great if you have the chance. It sounds fairly simple but just to make sure we do a similar test.

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-extensions/8ab06d43-a9d6-4702-aa18-526be1368f68n%40chromium.org.