Crashes Cause Cache to be Deleted

[littlebb87]

I'm fairly new to Pale Moon as I've only been using it for the last month or so - Version: 25.7.2 (Atom/WinXP). Before, I was using a much older version of Firefox.

My problem is this: it appears that when Pale Moon crashes, it deletes the cache. This annoys the crap out of me. Is it supposed to do that? Is there a way to change settings so it doesn't do that? I'm on dialup and when the cache gets deleted, it's a HUGE problem because browsing becomes even slower.

Under Cached Web Content, I have the override automatic cache management box checked. I have the cache limited to 200 MB. I haven't seen in get past 40 MB, the browser always crashes before it gets there.

I hope there's a way to fix this problem. If not, I'm gonna have to find another browser and I'd rather not do that, I like Pale Moon.

[Admin]

Well, first off, it's not supposed to crash that regularly, so you should primarily focus on that for starters. Disk cache is also relatively crash-resistant, so if it is cleared every time, then that might give an indicator as to the possible cause of your crashing to begin with: is something interfering with Pale Moon's disk writes? Is antivirus trying to check each cache file and index written on-access, for example?

[ashdav]

Some details of your system hardware may help.
Processor, amount of RAM, operating system.

[littlebb87]

Well this is a little embarrassing but my computer is:
Win XP Home SP3
2.4 GHz Celeron Processor
640 MB RAM
173 MB Available RAM
2.00 GB Total Virtual Memory, 1.96 GB Available


Pale Moon hasn't crashed that much, but more so in the last week. To be fair, I probably do considerably more browsing than the average person. I'm fairly used to Firefox (very old version) and Opera (very old version) crashing fairly regularly. I figured it had something to do with the memory. I could have sworn I had more than 173 MB available memory, but I could be wrong. Pale Moon typically uses around the same amount of memory as that old version of Firefox.

When Firefox crashed, I don't think it deleted the cache. Aren't Firefox and Pale Moon supposed to work the same (or close to it)? So I can't imagine that the antivirus is causing the problem. But I'm no expert either. Other than an old firewall, I don't have anything else running, not counting whatever crap Windows runs itself.

[ashdav]

The large amount of "missing" RAM is probably due to it being assigned to video use.
In the BIOS try reducing the amount set for video cache (or something similar) to 128MB.
Also try disabling hardware acceleration in Pale Moon.
The amount of RAM you have is a bit low even for XP.

[Moonchild]

Antivirus may likely know about Firefox and not Pale Moon, and so be more restrictive to Pale Moon. I can imagine the antivirus causing a problem. Please see if you can make on-access scanning exceptions for Pale Moon's profile folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\<User Name>\Application Data\Moonchild Productions\Pale Moon

Also, if your AV is a "modern" AV suite it likely accounts for a good chunk of your memory being unavailable; you may want to see about getting a more lightweight solution for it in that case, and use only on-demand scanning and applying good browsing practice principles otherwise.

[littlebb87]

Thanks ashdav and Moonchild.

I have an older and lightweight antivirus installed. I'm not sure I could find anything else lighter than that. It only uses between 10 MB to 15 MB RAM to run in the background. There isn't an option to make exceptions in the on-access scanning settings. The only thing I could do would be to temporarily turn off the option to scan created/modified files or to change which file types are scanned.

As I was typing this, I was looking at the settings in the AV software when the computer got very low on memory (totally my fault - too many things running at the same time). The computer froze for six minutes. I had to kill Pale Moon and the cache deleted again. So it appears that anytime Pale Moon gets shutdown improperly, the cache gets deleted. Does that mean anything?

[littlebb87]

I decided to run a test. I disconnected from the internet and shutdown all security software (AV and firewall). Then I shutdown Pale Moon correctly, waited a few seconds then restarted it and checked the cache. The same amount was still there - 2.2 MB. So then I used Task Manager to end palemoon.exe. When I restarted Pale Moon, the cache was deleted. So it's not the antivirus software or any other security software on my computer.

Doesn't that indicate the problem is within Pale Moon? Is it at all possible that this is happening to others but no one realizes it because most people probably have high speed internet? They probably wouldn't notice any slowness from deleted cache, but there's a huge difference in browsing speed for us dialup users. It's just a thought.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

I am just guessing so feel free to disregard this: If in the event the application is terminated unexpectedly eg from a crash or whatnot.. Wouldn't it be safer to invalidate and dump the cache anyway just to make sure it was not a leading cause? Does this happen in Pale Moon. ALSO the cache.. Did you check if it is deleted on startup after force ending the task?

[Moonchild]

Pale Moon doesn't delete the cache by itself unless one of the following applies:

• You are very low on free disk space (I assume that's not the case here)
• The cache and/or index has become corrupted
• The cache index is out of sync with the cached data (meaning the cached data can't be trusted to be correct)

I think the latter is the most likely case here. This still shouldn't happen when you just close the task or even if the browser crashes, unless this is done mid-write or your system-level disk caching is doing something strange.

Tobin's question is a good one: when exactly is the cache being deleted? Is it when the browser starts, or is it already gone when the task is killed?

[DixieKongJD]

I really think you should use a light Linux distro, programs are getting bulkier and bulkier and the need for new computers etc., some distros are really lightweight and work with programs like palemoon.

As much as XP is great (I use it on netbook and Vista on desktop) you barely have the system requirements for XP.

I'm guessing you don't want to buy a new computer for cost reasons, I understand that, because it's a general problem

[littlebb87]

If I just simply close Pale Moon, the cache doesn't get deleted. It only deletes when either the browser crashes or I force it to close down in Task Manager by killing palemoon.exe.

When the cache deletes, it does so ONLY when I restart Pale Moon, not actually when it crashes. But rather than actually delete the cache folder, Pale Moon renames it to something like cache.trash25131 and creates a new cache folder.

I did another test - I waited until my cache folder got to around 40 mb then closed Pale Moon. I copied the cache folder and renamed it to copycache. I opened Pale Moon and then closed it. I then deleted the current cache folder and replaced it with the copy and Pale Moon didn't like it so it renamed it to a trash file and replaced it with a clean cache folder.

So what does this tell you?
Is there a way to make a working backup of my cache? That way if my browser should crash, I could just simply use the cache backup.

[Moonchild]

It tells me that Pale Moon is doing what it is supposed to be doing: Delete the cache when it sees that it was not shut down in a clean state and the contents can't be trusted to be accurate.

You can make a backup of the cache and restore it, but that would likely not help much. What you should (once more) do, is focus on is preventing the crashes to begin with. Don't just kill the process from task manager from a running state, but focus on what makes you have to kill the process to begin with. Unfortunately, since you're on XP, the normal tools to analyze crashes (like appcrashview) won't work, so it'll be a bit more involved if the obvious culprits aren't the issue.

Maybe someone here can help you through the normal steps of troubleshooting program crashes on XP.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Sounds like NTFS detected corrupted cache files and the cache files were deleted by NTFS. (journal roll back)

That's why you also need a UPS...

[Moonchild]

Sounds like NTFS detected corrupted cache files and the cache files were deleted by NTFS. (journal roll back)
That's why you also need a UPS...

Incorrect. Tossing in wild guesses helps no man.

[Mercury]

It tells me that Pale Moon is doing what it is supposed to be doing: Delete the cache when it sees that it was not shut down in a clean state and the contents can't be trusted to be accurate.

I don't know. It seems too paranoid, too sensitive to wipe the cache every time the browser process dies unexpectedly. I would hope that during normal operation, the cache is only written to in batches, and spends most of its time in a "stable" state where it is not being written do. Killing the process during this time should not corrupt the cache, and it should not be deleted on subsequent program start. Basically, the cache mechanism should be resilient enough to handle 90%+ of unexpected process exit scenarios.

Processes crash. Computers get unplugged. OSes freeze. Shit happens. We can do better than throw our hands up in the air and say "Not my problem!"

(And I am speaking generally of developers, not singling out Moonchild here.)

[Moonchild]

Processes crash. Computers get unplugged. OSes freeze.

... and caches get corrupted.

Tell me: in what way is keeping track of cache integrity and taking the safe route of deleting untrusted cache entries "lazy"? I'd say the "lazy" approach would be relying on the user to manually clearing the cache if they get garbage in their browser.

Get back to the root of the problem though: Why is your browser crashing? Solve that, and this becomes a non-issue.