1108559 - Memory increases with tab that has an autoreload every 5 seconds

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Nigel]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0
Build ID: 20141125180439

Steps to reproduce:

Opened 5 tabs - one tab has an autoreload every 5 seconds


Actual results:

Firefox memory increased over time - around 50mb per hour.

Note that this has only happened since Firefox 34

Note Adblock Plus is enabled

Comment 1

[Nigel]

Attachment: 1memory-report.json.gz contains the initial state

Comment 2

[Nigel]

Have a memory file but cant upload

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Nigel from comment #2)
> Have a memory file but cant upload

Can you upload it somewhere like wetransfer or filedropper so we can look at it despite the bugzilla upload limit?

Comment 4

[Nigel]

http://www.filedropper.com/memory

Here is the file

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Attachment: memory.zip

Comment 6

[Nigel]

Please find at the link below a new pair of memory reports with Windows - it shows a 300MB rise in memory from a similar position to Firefox having run for a few hours.  http://www.filedropper.com/memory2

Comment 7

[tallard]

Have similar problem, cache empty, yet ram usage increases to 1.28gb within an 1-2 hrs and/or 5-10 tabs. Memory stays at 1.28gb even after closing tabs (about:memory). Ramback add-on does nothing. 
Using FF 34.0.5, Windows 7, ram4GB (2.9usable), i3CPU

Comment 8

[Nigel]

It appears that the issue is that memory reduction routines are not invoked. Manually invoking from about memory results in a dramatic release of memory.

The code in Firefox 34 is so bad, that I have had to regress by going to the ESR version of Firefox.  Note to do this you must first downgrade your release say to version 28 and then apply the ESR version or you will loose your addons and book marks.

The base issue of memory leak or its impact by not doing a GC is Critical.

To assist - the screens on the tabs are constantly being refreshed and maybe the GC routine has been modified to wait for a period of inactivity and as there is virtually none or the period needed to trigger it is not met, it is not invoked.  The rule should be to wait for a period of a fixed time which ever comes first and that would resolve the issue.

Note to reproduce you do not need say Zabbix, but you can repeat with a Jenkins server as well that has a number of jobs running every minute or so that each job runs for most of the time with auto refresh enabled.

Comment 9

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

(In reply to Nigel from comment #6)
> Please find at the link below a new pair of memory reports with Windows - it
> shows a 300MB rise in memory from a similar position to Firefox having run
> for a few hours.  http://www.filedropper.com/memory2

The file is not available at that URL. Can you upload it again?

Can you also please tell us exactly what steps you use to reproduce, including what site you have open. Thank you.

Comment 10

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

(In reply to tallard from comment #7)
> Have similar problem, cache empty, yet ram usage increases to 1.28gb within
> an 1-2 hrs and/or 5-10 tabs. Memory stays at 1.28gb even after closing tabs
> (about:memory). Ramback add-on does nothing. 
> Using FF 34.0.5, Windows 7, ram4GB (2.9usable), i3CPU

Can you please file a new bug report? When multiple people have the same vague symptoms ("high memory usage") it's quite possible that there are multiple root causes. Having mutiple people pile report their problems in a single bug report makes the bug report confusing and reduces the changes of problems being fixed. Thank you.

Comment 11

[Nigel]

Having sent the file - I deleted it and am now on the ESR branch that does not have the problems,

I have provided further analysis and a method of reproduction.

Comment 12

[Nigel]

Goes from 350MB with Firefox 31.4 (also similar with Firefox 33) to over 3GB of allocated Windows Memory on my system within 4 hours.  Note typical memory would be around 600mb over this time.  

Screen has around 150 items that can change apart from text output each 5 seconds

Comment 13

[Bernhard M. Wiedemann]

Attachment: memory-report.json.gz from keeping a jenkins page open for 10 days

look for the number 6095420424

possibly related to bug 751557 and bug 791695

Comment 14

[Paul Pasca[Away. Please needinfo? Paul Oiegas [:pauloiegasSV]]]

Hi Nigel,

Can you please share more information on how one tab has auto reload every 5 seconds? Did you use an add-on? If so, can you please provide a link from where I could download it, so I can test on my end? If not, how did you set a tab to refers every 5 seconds?

Also, please try to reproduce this on the latest release(43.0.3) and latest Nightly(46.0a1) and provide the results. When doing this, please try to reproduce with a new clean Firefox profile, maybe even in safe mode, as some of this issues may be caused by third party installed add-ons or custom settings(https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-and-diagnose-firefox-problems).

Thanks,
Paul.

Comment 15

[Paul Pasca[Away. Please needinfo? Paul Oiegas [:pauloiegasSV]]]

Since the reporter didn't provide the requested information, I will mark this issue as RESOLVED INCOMPLETE. If you still encounter this problem, please feel free to reopen this bug, or file a new one.