Closed Bug 557875 Opened 14 years ago Closed 13 years ago

Video Media Files Cause Apparent Memory Leak

Categories

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

3.6 Branch
x86
Windows XP
defect
Not set
critical

Tracking

()

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

People

(Reporter: rangerx64, Unassigned)

Details

(Keywords: stackwanted, Whiteboard: [closeme 2010-12-15])

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

After playing several video files of various types from around the net like youtube.com and bliptv.com, Firefox will suddenly freeze up and start churning system resources to the tune of 25-50% with a quad-fold increase in physical memory usage. I have had the memory footprint jump from around 250MB to over 1.5GB almost instantly when this process starts. After the initial surge Firefox usually either crashes or I have to kill the process because the freeze-ups continue with monotonous regularity until I do so. This PC is an Intel Core 2 quad-core PC with 8GB of RAM and tons of HDD space. It is built as a high-end gamer, so it is not a resource or horsepower issue nor is the issue isolated to this particular PC (I have eight high-end PCs like this).  This bug occurs on any computer in which I utilize Firefox in this way and it has done so for several iterations of the browser.

Is there any suggestions regarding tweaks, usage or whatever to alleviate this problem with streaming media files or is this simply a bug in the way Firefox caches and retrieves this information?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Watch several media clips within the browser, especially bliptv.com and youtube.com

2. The length of time to reproduce the problem varies, but seems related to whether or not the browser has been up and running with several tabs and/or windows open for extended periods of time. It is more prone to occur and to do so much sooner of this is the case.

3.
Actual Results:  
Firefox eventually begins freezing up and using excessive system resources requiring termination and restarting of the application.

Expected Results:  
The browser should not suddenly quadruple its system resource and memory usage footprint resulting in unmanageable application freeze-ups, but it does. The expectation is that it should simply continue to function at the same level and resource usage as it did prior to the freezing process.

It can become severe enough on low resource systems to require an actual hard-reboot to regain control of the system because the resulting resource usage becomes so high the system ceases to respond at all.
Version: unspecified → 3.6 Branch
Do you see this with newer versions of flash and firefox, started in safe mode?
If you do, please post crash ID and cite URLs.
Keywords: stackwanted
Whiteboard: [closeme 2010-12-15]
No reply, INCOMPLETE. Please retest with Firefox 3.6.13 or later and a new profile (http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles). If you continue to see this issue with the newest firefox and a new profile, then please comment on this bug.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 13 years ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE
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