FireFox and NFSv4

[Freddie Cash]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 8:36 AM Andrea Venturoli <ml at netfence.it> wrote:

> Hello.
>
> For years I've had my home on an NFSv3 server.
> Finally I decided to move to NFSv4.
>
> Now the following happens every now and then (let's say, 1 out of 5
> times I launch it):
> _ FireFox is closed (no process running);
> _ I open FireFox and, while it works, a red message appears saying:
> "The bookmarks and history system will not be functional because one of
> Firefox's files is in use by another application. Some security software
> can cause this problem";
> _ I can close FireFox, but I'll have to wait for a while to reopen it,
> or I'll get the "Firefox is already running but not responding" window.
> _ After a while I can open it again with no warning.
>
> Nothing to really worry about, but I'm curious (and would like to be
> sure no latent problem is there).
>
> Of course I beleive the reference to "security software" does not apply
> to UNIX systems; I don't think anything is accessing FF files either.
>
> What should I check?
>

Seems to be a known issue with NFS storage of the .mozilla folder that's
made worse with NFSv4:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1428169

Has to do with file locking and race conditions in the multi-process setup,
and using SQLite databases for everything.

There's a couple of workaround listed in there (see comment 29) that work
for most people.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com