I'm running a web application under Tomcat 7, Ubuntu 14.04 that starts an instance of Firefox (currently version 29) using the Java Selenium driver to take screenshots of simple locally defined web pages.
Occasionally, Firefox becomes unresponsive. When this happens there is a "defunct" Firefox instance listed by ps
like this:
$ ps -elfwww | grep irefox
0 S tomcat7 18004 17574 0 80 0 - 100490 futex_ 05:31 ? 00:00:01 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -silent
1 Z tomcat7 18010 18004 0 80 0 - 0 exit 05:31 ? 00:00:00 [firefox] <defunct>
When Firefox is up and running properly it looks more like this:
$ ps -elfwww | grep irefox
0 R tomcat7 19542 17574 38 80 0 - 156275 ? 09:38 ? 00:00:08 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -foreground
I'm baffled by the different command line options passed to Firefox in these two cases. Why "-silent" vs "-foreground"? What can be done to prevent this?
I'm not seeing any messages about selenium printed in the application's error log.