What about reported FireFox 1.5 bug, that generates extra reloads?

[BradK]

On the SMF bulletin board there is a recent post about a bug in Firefox 1.5, that generates continuous high-repetition reload requests for their forum (SMF). The post is Here and the Mozilla/Firefox bug report is Here (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318419)

The gist of the bug is an overflow on timers, causing immense loads on the server as the browser keeps repeating a page reload-in-the-background command. Now when everyone with a Firefox/Mozilla/Seamonkey browser updates their browser, this won't be an issue.

In the mean time, could this be a reason that some applications would suddenly start causing server resource problems?

Brad "My account was just shut down because my 8 year old forum script suddenly up took too much system resources" K.

(Not complaining, just trying to understand what happened.)

[Pedja]

Yes, it is possible, that, if you have large enough number of visitors using buggy FF, they will produice large ammount of traffic on your site. That is exactly how bug is detected.

The best option is to apply patch to SMF which handles the problem.

Prolem is actually, result usage of Ajax in SMF. Ajax itslef is not a problem, but it relays on timers, and due to timer bug, it ends up making far too much requests to the site.