Re: Netscape Freezes

Bruce Carter (bcarter@mentor.idbsu.edu)
Sun, 7 Jul 1996 11:37:00 EDT

Tobin Witt wrote:
>>Using the Internet Dialer I connect to the Internet, use Netscape 2.0,
>>and then disconnect from the Internet. No problem. However, whenever I
>>try to reconnect to the Internet a second time, either the system will
>>freeze, the screen becomes garbled, or nothing happens and I must force
>>the Dialer to quit. Like I said, Apple thinks these are extension conflicts.

>Bruce Carter <bcarter@mentor.idbsu.edu> replied:
>>Try restarting between connections. We have had trouble with Apple Remote
>>Access in the same way if we don't restart the system between remote access
>>connections.

At 11:46 AM 7/6/96, Susan Oates wrote:
>Restarting . . . ! It seems excessive to have to restart the computer to
>get Netscape to work again. However, when the machine freezes, there's no
>choice if you want to get back on the Web.

Let me expand on that a bit. I haven't done the technical trackdown on
this yet, but a couple of things seem to be happening. Netscape has a
known anomoly on the Mac where it sometimes gets caught up making a
repeated system call and ties itself in a knot. Remote connections seem to
be particularly sensitive to this. There is a patch floating around that
helps fix this (I'm not sure where), but I've found that reducing the
number of connections that Netscape is allowed to open improves reliability
considerably.

Secondly, something in the mix doesn't seem able to forget that an IP
address has been assigned after a disconnection and reconnection with
server based IP addressing. I get locked up almost every time if I don't
restart between connections.

--
Bruce Carter, Instructional Software Designer  (208)385-1851@voice
Boise State University, Boise, ID  83725       (208)385-1856@fax
http://mentor.idbsu.edu/BruceCarter/home.html  bcarter@mentor.idbsu.edu