Closed Bug 767753 Opened 12 years ago Closed 12 years ago

System memory limit always causes crash

Categories

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

13 Branch
x86
Windows XP
defect
Not set
critical

Tracking

()

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

People

(Reporter: skmail, Unassigned)

Details

(Keywords: stackwanted)

If Firefox memory demands come close to the system memory limit, Firefox will crash - often even without launching crash reporter.


Due to crash dumps the minimum memory usage to trigger a crash is about 98%.
Allowing virtual memory on Windows (swapping to a page file) fixes the problem as long as the page file is configured to be large enough.

I consider the bug as critical since crash reporter usually won't start with this issue  (thus we do not know how many users really are affected), 
it might be introduced in version 12.0, but alternatively could be caused by an increased memory consumption of version 12.0 which just hit my personal OS memory limit.

Instead of silently crashing, Firefox should at least show a warning if available memory comes close to the limit.
Priority: -- → P3
Priority: P3 → --
Please provide your steps to reproduce.
Does it happen in Safe Mode (see http://support.mozilla.org/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode)?
Can you provide your crash ID (bp...) from about:crashes when there are some?
Component: General → Untriaged
QA Contact: general → untriaged
Sorry, I forgot steps to reproduce: Either open enough web-pages until the browser hits your personal memory limit or remove enough hardware memory modules (disable any virtual memory paging too)

My reports were not submitted due to a blocking firewall, also are lost because of a profile deletion. Since there were only very few cases where crash-reporter was launched (about 2 times of 50 crashes) I won't repeat the procedure. Meanwhile I re-enabled virtual memory swapping and I'm happy that the browser has become stable again.
Sorry, I forgot steps to reproduce: Either open enough web-pages until the browser hits your personal memory limit or remove enough hardware memory modules (disable any virtual memory paging too)

My reports were not submitted due to a blocking firewall, also are lost because of a profile deletion. Since there were only very few cases where crash-reporter was launched (about 2 times of 50 crashes) I won't repeat the procedure. Meanwhile I re-enabled virtual memory swapping and I'm happy that the browser has become stable again.
Note that I have no Flash or other plug-in installed on system.
Opening hundreds of tabs doesn't crash Firefox for me.
Has nothing to do with the number of opened tabs (I don't how much memory your machine provides), the crucial condition is that your OS memory limit is hit.
So you are asking that a user with 128MB of RAM or a user with 8GB of RAM is able to open thousands or millions of tabs without crashing Firefox. The Firefox behavior depends on HW resources that are limited.
You don't ask a Beetle to be as fast a Formula one.
No, I'm not talking about the amount of tabs opened but about available RAM in general. To recreate this issue, you certainly should choose another way if you really need to open hundreds of tabs, 

You could try to open another application at the same time, lets say an image viewer showing many large high-resolution bitmaps. This should eat up lots of RAM. Alternatively remove as many hardware RAM modules as possible.

For example, I only have 1 GB hardware RAM available: Lots of smaller applications are running besides Firefox. Usually theres still some free RAM available for me, However opening about 50 FF tabs gets me close to the memory limit where FF will crash.

Also remember to disable memory paging, that's very important.
OOM crashes can be filed but each different crash needs it's own bug report and Stack traces are required.
You can use https://developer.mozilla.org/en/How_to_get_a_stacktrace_with_WinDbg if the crash reporter doesn't work.
Well, I'm happy that I could support Firefox development by posting a severe problem.
As I can see, you know very well how to continue in tracing the issue.
Wishing you success.

But now it's time for me to continue in development and support of my own software projects.
Keywords: stackwanted
As no stack trace has been provided, I close it as incomplete.
Please reopen if you have one.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 12 years ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE
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