Update… 30 full days since my last post about stability and have not experienced a single crash on either mirror. So, Electron is definitely the source of the problem.
Thank you to @sdetweil for the assistance in swapping over to Chromium and getting things to a stable state.
@cowboysdude I agree that most are quick to say “do this for me” and seldom say “how can I help you get this changed?” When you’re dealing with commercial products, that approach is expected because the source is closed. But, this is open-source and community-developed. We all have the ability to contribute -something-…
@raf So, figure out what’s incorrect and help get it updated. The doc you’re trying to work from was built in that same way at one point…
@raf Are you volunteering? :)
Seriously - You won’t be anywhere near as well-versed as if you can figure it out on your own. And documenting your learnings to help others is how all of this stuff grows and improves. I’ve pestered @sdetweil plenty about a lot - much of his input has been to help me understand where to look, but he has also done some coding and such on his side. I’ve offered back some things I learned along the way that he has then incorporated and I’m now going to look into helping to extend and enhance some work he has done by doing the coding myself. It take a village, as they say…
@sdetweil said in new update/upgrade script, ready for testing:
Where’s a good place to discuss the scripts? I’m wondering how feasible and useful it might be to add to the upgrade-script.sh one.
A couple of quick questions…
The “UpdateNotification” module is able to detect that there is a new version of MM available. Is this logged somewhere or easily accessible from the command line? I’m interested in writing a script that can assess the new version, possibly run a ‘test upgrade’ and then send me a IFTTT or pushover notification that a new version is available and an upgrade test succeeded (or failed).
Is the new upgrade script bundled with MM yet? I thought that was the intent, but did not see it up through 2.10.x
@sdetweil v10 is out and listed as “stable”.
@sdetweil I can appreciate that - I work for a software company, and know about inter-dependencies and the headaches they can cause.
MM is, in a very basic sense, a web server. Electron is a web browser. There shouldn’t be inter-dependencies between a web server and browser, and that seems to be apparent with Chromium not having an issue running against the MM server. So, I would hope that Electron could be brought forward or at least Chromium be documented as an solid alternative.
UPDATE: At this point, I’m closing in on a full week of operating two mirrors without issue. I’ve changed to running Chromium instead of Electron and it’s working well all around. Here are some details of the operation in case it’s useful:
Prior to successfully switching over to Chromium, the devices would crash at least once every other day (at least one of them would crash during a 48 hour window), although it was much more common to see each one crash multiple times per day. There was no consistency to which one would crash, why, when, etc. The “crash” in question was a black screen on the mirror and no visible info being output although the mouse cursor would sometimes appear. I wrote a cron job that would run every five minutes, look up the location of the pm2 error logs, check to see if there was an “out of memory” error in the log, and do a restart of MM if there was (the restart consisted of shut down, log flush, and start). This job ran every five minutes and would silently exit if there was no error as the mirror was running ok.
Since the switchover, I have seen zero crashes on either device in almost seven days of operation.
Electron has been discussed ad nauseum as having a variety of shortcomings, bugs, issues, etc. - especially in the old version being used with MM. At this point, I have to wonder why it’s still not only the default but the ‘only’ browser that’s really discussed for use with MM. It would seem that it’s time to either forklift an upgrade to it within MM or switch to something else (at a minimum, at least provide a well-documented alternative).
I’m grateful to @sdetweil for his assistance with this, especially since it really took a calendar year almost to get to a point where it’s seemingly working as expected now.
I’m now about 2.5 days into two MM’s running without crashes using Chromium instead of Electron. I’ve also not seen a return of the pop up from Chromium about needing to be updated.
For those that might need to correct the update issue, here’ s what I did on my mirrors:
sudo touch /etc/chromium-browser/customizations/01-disable-update-check;echo CHROMIUM_FLAGS=\"\$\{CHROMIUM_FLAGS\} --check-for-update-interval=31536000\" | sudo tee /etc/chromium-browser/customizations/01-disable-update-check