Repost: Brave hangs up daily and takes multiple attempts to restart

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I’m reposting this after 24 days, as I may have put the original in the wrong place.

Brave, Version 1.52.130 Chromium: 114.0.5735.198 (Official Build) (64-bit), is hanging up about once a day on my Linux (fully up to date KDE Neon) machine. All Brave windows become unresponsive - no context menu on right mouse button, no refresh button response. Once this happens, the only recourse is to kill the brave processes (I use xkill) and then restart the browser.

When I restart Brave, it hangs on restart almost every time, and has to be killed again, and this can repeat 3 or 4 times before a successful restart.
Specifically:-
It often hangs with a partially drawn single window - no controls or “restore tabs” button.

It also often hangs with only the “restore tabs” button visible, but clicking it does nothing.

Sometimes the restore tabs button is clickable, and the windows appear but are responsive…a few times I see a message about not having an active internet connection, but I do - it’s only Brave saying that.

Sometimes it draws the windows and tabs but they take 5 or more minutes to render, and are often unresponsive and sometimes show the no active internet connection dialog.

This happens about once a day, and usually takes 3 or 4 restart attempts.
When Brave has hung, there is sometimes some heavy CPU use, according to “top”, but the rest of the system is responsive.

I have over 130 tabs open, in 15 windows in 4 KDE Desktops. I’m available for any debugging and diagnostic work - I’m a Linux Sys Admin and developer. I’m wondering about extensions, as they are often suspects! They should be visible in the attached screenshot.
Thanks for any help and advice.

brave-tabs
brave-tabs2057×1080 264 KB

---------------------System Info-------------------------------
Operating System: KDE neon 5.27
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.6
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.107.0
Qt Version: 5.15.10
Kernel Version: 5.19.0-45-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 24 × AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor
Memory: 47.0 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 6600
Manufacturer: ASUS

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Indeed, but you would be the primary person to test that. If you create a new browser profile within Brave and use it without adding the extensions, does the issue happen?

Or you can just jump straight to the idea of removing/disabling each extension and testing. Which is what the next step would be if new profile has no issue.

Might be a silly question for you since you are a sys admin and developer, but I’m going to ask anyway…have you made sure all of your drivers are updated?

Guess let me also ask, if you hit Shift+Esc it should open Brave’s task manager. Could you try having that running and see if you can refer to it when you’re having issues? Maybe grab a screenshot if possible. I’m wondering if there’s any high computer usage or anything happening there.

Out of curiosity, do you have anything at brave://crashes? If you see anything there that says Send Now, then you’ll need to click that and then exit Brave for like 30 seconds, then open and go back to brave://crashes. The goal is to see something that shows Uploaded crash report ID and to copy/paste that here.

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Firstly, Saoiray, thanks for responding! I know how busy supporting development can be, and it’s appreciated.

To try to answer your points in sequence…

Extensions
I’m going to try disabling all extensions, and then re-enable them one at a time. This will take a bit of time, as you can imagine, as it’s at least a 24 hour turn-around time, and first time, with no extensions at all, I’ll need to wait at least a couple of days to see if anything goes wrong. I’ll start that tonight, after work - I use Brave as my production browser, and have no desire to switch.

Drivers
I’m running a fully-patched version of KDE Neon, which is based on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy). If there are drivers to update, I have no desire to get into backporting more recent sources, plus I don’t know which driver to look at first (GPU??), plus this is my work machine, and other browsers (Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi and Chrome) don’t misbehave.

Shift+Esc
I didn’t know about this, but I’m monitoring it now. Thanks for that tip.
I’d like to figure out a way to get that task info into a time series database for later inspection, as the hangs seems to occur in the middle of the night so far. By the time I see it, the machine is quiet.

brave://crashes
Another new thing I just learned…thank you again! That page currently shows 50 crashes, but I’m sure some of those are from me killing the already hung processes…

Many of the crashes are already uploaded, and I just hit “Send Now” on a few more, which are showing “Upload requested by user”. Will the uploaded crash info give any hints about extensions?

Anyway, here’s the first page of those already uploaded in text form, so you don’t have to type in hex strings…

Crash from Friday, July 14, 2023 at 9:12:08 PM
Status: Uploaded
Uploaded Crash Report ID: 8ed40300-e8f6-640a-0000-000000000000
Upload Time: Friday, July 14, 2023 at 9:12:08 PM
Provide additional details
Crash from Friday, July 14, 2023 at 6:13:17 PM
Status: Uploaded
Uploaded Crash Report ID: bbaa0300-e8f6-640a-0000-000000000000
Upload Time: Friday, July 14, 2023 at 6:13:17 PM
Provide additional details
Crash from Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 11:49:10 PM
Status: Uploaded
Uploaded Crash Report ID: 0c380a00-5dbb-5b0a-0000-000000000000
Upload Time: Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 11:49:10 PM
Provide additional details
Crash from Saturday, July 8, 2023 at 3:52:20 PM
Status: Not uploaded
Send now
Crash from Saturday, July 8, 2023 at 3:49:57 PM
Status: Uploaded
Uploaded Crash Report ID: ad0c0500-5dbb-5b0a-0000-000000000000
Upload Time: Saturday, July 8, 2023 at 3:49:57 PM
Provide additional details
Crash from Friday, July 7, 2023 at 9:59:01 AM
Status: Uploaded
Uploaded Crash Report ID: 3c2f0300-5dbb-5b0a-0000-000000000000
Upload Time: Friday, July 7, 2023 at 9:59:02 AM
Provide additional details
Crash from Monday, July 3, 2023 at 12:21:26 PM
Status: Uploaded
Uploaded Crash Report ID: 63ae0700-0583-520a-0000-000000000000
Upload Time: Monday, July 3, 2023 at 12:21:26 PM

Just for completeness, attached is a screenshot of that page…

brave-crashes
brave-crashes3697×1858 413 KB

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Yeah, that’s where you have to exit the browser so it can upload. Takes about 30 seconds, then can reopen. Next time you check the brave://crashes it should show uploaded.

Not necessarily. It might give enough of a hint that an extension is causing the problem but uncertain that they see enough to tell you which extension is “bad,” assuming there is one.

Do keep in mind I’m just a normal user who spends time trying to help with basic issues. My technical expertise is limited and I’m definitely not a programmer or developer. You can think of me as someone who essentially tries to triage issues, gathering the necessary & relevant data for Support and Devs, so that they can spend more time on the issues instead of having to ask a bunch of questions.

I’ll tag @Mattches and @steeven on this on hopes they can check in with you later. If nothing else to get the crash reports sent over to the devs and see if they can provide some feedback on that.

5

Hi again, Saoiray…

Thanks again for the help and learnings!

I exited Brave in a graceful way - no “kill -9 or xkill” this time. The crashes did indeed upload, and the most recent are…

Crash from Friday, July 14, 2023 at 9:16:55 PM
Status: Uploaded
Uploaded Crash Report ID: 70d20700-e8f6-640a-0000-000000000000
Upload Time: Monday, July 17, 2023 at 4:16:40 PM
Crash from Friday, July 14, 2023 at 9:12:24 PM
Status: Uploaded
Uploaded Crash Report ID: 6fd20700-e8f6-640a-0000-000000000000
Upload Time: Monday, July 17, 2023 at 4:16:39 PM

I also learned something new…even with a clean exit, the startup hang occurred, and I had to kill the Brave processes again. It started on the second try, but there’s nothing new in the “crashes” page, which makes me wonder if the crashes are all me killing the application with xkill, and the hang is not crashing the browser at all. I don’t know if the startup hang is the same as the hang after a long time of clean operation. The process monitor didn’t show any excess CPU or memory use during the startup hang.

Cheers,

Paul

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My brave browser was also having issues on KDE neon recently. In fact it wouldn’t start up at all. I had to download the snap via discover.

Then I copied the folder /home/‘user’/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-browser

to

/home/‘user’/snap/brave/current/.config/BraveSoftware/

This was to copy all bookmarks, history, rewards etc etc over to the new browser

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If you have issues copying the entire folder then copy the contents to the folder of the same name in the snap

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Sorry about the long silence - I had to travel to Scotland for a week. I’m ready to try the experiment with extensions disabled. However…I can’t find a way to disable extensions via a command-line switch. Is there such a thing? Trying brave --help just returns an error that there is no manual entry for brave.

Does Brave honor Chromium switches like --disable-extensions or --bwsi (browse without sign-in), which is supposed to disable extensions? By which I mean, although Brave starts with the --disable-extensions switch, is it really disabling extensions?

Thanks,

Paul

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I should think before I post! It seems Brave does observe the --disable-extensions switch. I listed the loaded extensions in about:extensions, then killed brave and restarted with brave --disable-extensions. Now the about:extensions page is empty. So now I’ll wait a few days to see if the hang still occurs.

P.

1 Like
10

OK - the hang repeated itself after about 24 hours with extensions disabled. A shell session transcript is attached, just in case it’s any use.
brave-transcript-up-to-hang.txt (16.7 KB)

There are no new crashes in brave://crashes/, supporting my idea that the crashes logged may have been caused by me killing the processes with the equivalent of kill -9. That suggests that the observed behavior is not a crash, just a hang.

Anyway… @Saoiray … any suggestions as to what to do now? Is it time for a more formal bug report?

Thanks,

Paul

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Apologies for the silence here @phands. Can you update to the latest Brave version and let me know if this continues? You can just tag me here directly in the thread. Thank you.

12

@steeven Thanks for the quick reply. I just updated Brave to Version 1.56.20 Chromium: 115.0.5790.171 (Official Build) unknown (64-bit) a few minutes ago…is that the latest version you mean? That’s the only one that was in the release list for today on KDE Neon. It will take at least 24 hours - maybe a few days - to see if it hangs. I restarted with extensions enabled, as that didn’t seem to be the problem, but I can easily disable them if you think that will help.

Thanks,

Paul

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Thanks @phands, yes that’s the latest version, released yesterday. Let’s first try it with extensions enabled, and if it does hang, then try with them disabled. Thank you @phands.

14

Great troubleshooting here.
@phands if the crashes occur again, can you please make sure you share the crash report IDs with us here? We’ll need newer ones than the ones you shared with us earlier in the thread in order to accurately diagnose the issue.

I am also not convinced that this is the issue but it may be worth testing to see if disabling Hardware Acceleration has any effect on this behavior (Settings --> System --> Hardware Acceleration).

15

@Mattches I will happily share any new crash reports with you. That said, I have a concern that any crash dumps are actually triggered by me killing the processes with the xkill command, which can have unpredictable consequences, as it only tells the X server to disconnect from the process. I have a suspicion that the hang is not a crash, and isn’t being treated as such. For example, when I terminated a hung Brave session with a ctrl-c from the shell, there was no new crash info.

As of today, the new version of Brave has been running about 4 days without hanging, so I have no new info. I’ll give it until Friday before deciding that it may have stopped the hang behavior. Was there a fix or change in the newest version that may have affected this?

I’ll try the hardware acceleration setting once this experiment is over.

1 Like
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Nothing that I know of that addresses this specific type of issue, but often times Chromium updates and other typical bug fixes may have an affect on these types of issues.

Please keep us updated on the status of the hanging issue and we’ll continue troubleshooting if necessary.

Thank you

1 Like
17

Hi,

Since the last update, Brave has not hung up at all. That makes 10 days with all of the windows and tabs as before.

Given this, I think we should discontinue this effort, and if hangs recur, I’ll reopen. Thanks for all the help and suggestions from the Brave team.

Regards,

Paul

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Disculpen que haga este comentario por acá, se que están hablando específicamente sobre Brave en Linux, pero el problema que tiene el usuario @phands, me pasa lo mismo, pero yo uso Sistema Operativo Windows, lo empecé a usar porque me dijeron que era el mejor, en cuanto a velocidad y uso de recursos, así lo era hasta hace unos días, al iniciar Brave se inicia tal cual como se cerro por ultima vez, todo marcha bien, pero al pasar unos minutos las ventanas que están abiertas, algunas funcionan otras no, al abrir una nueva pestaña, la abre pero no carga nada como si no hubiese internet, además de eso, no se puede utilizar ninguna función del explorador Brave, es como si se deshabilitaran, entonces llega un momento en que hay que volver a reiniciar y vuelve a funcionar hasta que pasen unos minutos y el problema vuelve, no instale nada nuevo desde que instale el navegador Brave, desinstalé todas las extensiones, también desinstale y volví a instalarlo, al iniciarlo me pidió que cargara configuración de otro navegador, era opcional, yo elegí que cargue la configuración del Google Chrome, pero el problema persistió, si tienen conocimiento de alguna solución, por favor me podrían avisar, gracias de antemano.

19

@RAVS Since their issue at least appears resolved, I am going to close this topic. Please create a new topic for yours. When you do, try to make sure to provide as much detail as possible. You can check Creating Topics for some basic guidance on how to create topics and information you should provide.

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