For the past month or so I’ve had this intermittent problem where chromium would start crashing and would keep crashing every time I tried to start it until I rebooted.

Today I ran chromium under strace and straightaway discovered that it was trying to use shared memory in /dev/shm and it couldn’t because there was no space left.

There was no space left because I had PHP’s xdebug writing dump files there. I’ve just disabled xdebug while I’m not using it and after clearing out its old files I can now run chromium again.

I added a note about this to my debugging notes for in case this or something like it happens to me again.