# Reboot frozen FreeBSD system?



## Jason_25 (Jan 26, 2018)

I have wanted to ask this question for a while.

I am not a developer so do not have any debugging turned on.

This is not a server or embedded system so it does not have a serial console.

Every time this happens to me I search, and every time I am shocked that there is no solution.

How to reboot and avoid data corruption, as can so easily be done with Linux?


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## SirDice (Jan 26, 2018)

Press the power button [*]. A short press will normally trigger a proper, clean, shutdown of the machine. Unless the machine is really, completely, hung up. In that case there's really nothing else you could do than forcefully reset or turn it off (with the inherent risk of filesystem corruption).

[*] Make sure the power button function is set to '4 second delay' in the BIOS. Or else it will simply power off immediately.


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## Jason_25 (Jan 26, 2018)

I have had success with doing that in the past but the power button did not respond with this system, even after several minutes.

This happened because Firefox 39.0 from many many years ago used all 4GB system RAM and 2GB swap with 8 tabs of mostly text, at 750 MB per tab average.

When the system "swaps" it gives me a feeling that I have not felt since Windows 95 days, the cursor even stops moving.  I noticed that when I do not use a swapfile or swap partition at all then Firefox just crashes when it hits some limit.  This seems preferable to just dragging the system down.

Firefox also runs slow with 1 tab open.  I nominate that version as worst version of Firefox.  Version 45.8.0 on Linux is also awesomely terrible just to throw that out there.

So to break it down there are at least four distinct problems here.  *Like an air disaster, technology disasters like this are not caused by any single factor.*
1. FreeBSD should be able to respond to the power button as you pointed out
2. Firefox leaks memory (an update could solve this so this should be low priority)
3. FreeBSD deals with the memory leak in a less than good way
4. Firefox is slow


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