How can I prevent Jira failing the first time I access it each day?

[Mark_Booth]

The first time I start up my web browser each day, I log into JIRA, but my Dashboard is empty and my Agile boards have a big red error. In addition, none of the drop down menus work.

The big red error is:

An error occurredHide…

Please try refreshing the page, or contact your administrator / Atlassian Support if the problem continues.
Details

        Exception: NS_ERROR_FILE_CORRUPTED: Component returned failure code: 0x8052000b (NS_ERROR_FILE_CORRUPTED) [nsIDOMStorage.getItem]
        Resource: http://jira.diamond.ac.uk/s/482adb0e9f17655bbf5eddde396987e6-T/en_UK-j4h70s/6344/6/5b18d2f98945e867b0bead63c497af6f/_/download/contextbatch/js/greenhopper-rapid-non-gadget,atl.general,gh-rapid,jira.global/batch.js?locale=en-UK
        Line: 1500

Environment
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0

The way I have been working around the problem so far is to quit my web browser, wait for it to close and then open it again. When it comes back up, my Dashboard, Agile board and menus are all just as I expect.

Originally I found the following following suggestion over on Stack Exchange:

Please clear your storage by going to Tools -> Clear Recent History -> Cookies and set time range to 'Everything'. This will remove the corrupted browser storage across all sites.

I did this, but the problem kept returning (it was how I discovered that just restarting the browser fixed the problem temporarily).

This does not happen on any other computer I use, or with any profile other than my main Firefox profile. I do not have the ability to use any other browser and would prefer not to ditch my current profile and start a new one if I can fix this problem without doing so.

Note that I am using Firefox ESR 31.2.0, and our JIRA installation is: Atlassian JIRA Project Management Software (v6.3.13#6344-sha1:62d2b41)

Incidentally, the same thing happened here on Atlassian Answers. When I first submitted this question I was unable to edit the description, so it ended up being blank. When I restarted my browser, returned to this page and went to edit it, the edit box came up as expected.

[Mark_Booth · Accepted solution]

According to this ask Ubuntu answer:

Firefox stores its HTML5 data in a file called webappsstore.sqlite. That's sitting in your profile directory which lurks somewhere in ~/.mozilla/firefox/....default/ (depending on what your profile is called).

Move that out the way and restart Firefox and everything will come back to life.

    More: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/dom/storage

So, I closed Firefox, removed the webappsstore.sqlite file from my profile (it hadn't been written to recently) and restarted Firefox. This was on Friday afternoon.

On Monday morning, I started Firefox, and after logging in, JIRA worked without problems.

So I believe that I can confirm that this problem was a corrupted webappsstore.sqlite file, and that removing it fixed the problem, where clearing history and cookies etc. failed to fix the problem.

[Philipp Sendek]

Thanks for the heads-up. Such problems usually occur when, indeed, the cache of the browser has some trouble. However it's rather weird that it's only after the initial startup and not anymore after that. It sounds a bit like the file regularly becomes corrupted during shutdown - given, of course, the solution above actually fixed the issue.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That would make sense - corrupted data read in from that sqlite file, it can't handle the sites initially, then your first usage corrects the fault in a cache, and it works ok until it re-reads bad data on restart.

[Mark_Booth]

As I said, `webappsstore.sqlite` hasn't changed in some time (months). The problem started after we upgraded Jira, so my suspicion is that is is some change in the authentication method. It is possible that the database holds and old authentication token which looks like it should work. When Jira first starts up in the morning (or mid afternoon when the previous token appears to time out, forcing a re-login) it creates a new auth token on login and then tries to use it, but because the browser still tries to use the old one, and that is failing, things break. After the browser restart, Jira doesn't need to refresh the token, doesn't expect a new one in the database and everything is fine. Ultiumately I will see on Monday morning if it breaks again.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

What do you mean by "fails"?  What errors are you seeing, and what symptoms?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Sounds like there is something iffy in your browser - could you test it with another browser quickly?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You don't know that - if your browser is doing something unusual or non-standard, then you're now asking someone to code for every possible odd thing a browser might do that isn't standard. Atlassian do stick quite closely to standards, and test with Firefox and Chrome, and other people are not reporting this error, so it's almost certain that it is something on your side, and that's probably browser related. The only way you're going to be able to debug this and lay the blame on the server side is by ruling out the browser.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You've misunderstood what I'm getting at - trying another browser is not a solution, it's a test to try to narrow down the problem. Trying another system is nearly as good a test, as you've now proved that it is something on your system and not a problem in the service software. There's something in your setup that breaks it, and it's probably in the browser setup. Have you any plugins? Definitely using the latest version for Firefox?

[Philipp Sendek]

In addition to the question about which plugins are installed, it could be helpful to have a look at the firebug/devtools console and see whether there are any errors with loading javascript libraries or similar.