1012602 - Increasing memory usage overnight to multiple GiB in Firefox 29

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

In bug 1005887 comment 12 Dmitry said:

> after working day i keep firefox open for all night, at
> next morning my computer is unusable and has 100% cpu load, firefox eats 5.5Gb
> memory(all available 4gb + 1.5gb SWAP). this problem is occured only after
> upgrade to 29 firefox version.

I spun it off into a separate bug in case the underlying cause is different to that of bug 1005887.

Comment 1

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

When Firefox is showing these symptoms -- i.e. the next morning -- can you please type
"about:memory" into the address bar, and then hit the "Measure and save..."
button, and then attach the resulting file to this bug? (Note that this file
may contain information such as what sites you have visited; if putting that
into a public bug report make you uncomfortable you could instead email it to
me.)

Also, can you type "about:support" into the address bar, and then click on the
"Copy text to clipboard" button, and then paste the results into a file and
attach that here as well? Among other things, that will tell us what add-ons
you have installed.

With those two files, we'll have a decent chance of working out what's
wrong. Thanks!

Comment 2

[Dmitry]

unfortunately i can't to do it. system hangs and i cant even to authenticate to my desktop. only one way login to X-window session is to kill firefox from another console session(for example CTRL+ALT+F5 and after kill -9 firefox_pid)

Comment 3

[Dmitry]

so, i will restart computer after working day,then start and keep firefox open for all night. next morning if i can to login i will provide all information that you requested before.

Comment 4

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

You can get the about:support information before the performance gets bad.

Comment 5

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Also on Linux you can do:
  kill -SIGRTMIN firefox_pid
which will dump a memory-report-<timestamp>-<pid>.json.gz file into /tmp, assuming FF is still able to.

Comment 6

[Dmitry]

Hi, i did about:support and about:memory this morning.
how can i attach it to this bug?

Comment 7

[Dmitry]

Attachment: memory-report.json.gz

Comment 8

[Dmitry]

Attachment: bug_about_support.txt

Comment 9

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

Thanks, Dmitry. How was Firefox behaving when you visited about:memory? The memory report you attached doesn't look particular unusual. Physical memory ("resident") is 695 MiB, which isn't pretty normal for that many tabs. Virtual memory is 1830 MiB which is a bit on the high side but not alarming.

About the only thing notable I can see is this:

> └────212 (04.10%) ── add-ons/{FC5BAC7D-D696-4ba6-B913-CF8F000C33DF}/window-objects/top(chrome://newtabking/content/ntk_out.htm, id=13)/active/window(chrome://newtabking/content/ntk_out.htm)/dom/event-listeners

Which means... well, it might be worth trying to disable the New Tab King add-on and see if that helps. Many of the reviews at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-king/reviews/ suggest that it's spyware.

Comment 10

[Dmitry]

i'm using  new tab king more than 2 years. and memory leak was started since i upgraded to 29 firefox version. so, for experiment i will try to disable this addon.
this morning my system wasn't hanged, maybe because i restarted firefox after yesterday working day.

Comment 11

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

If you want us to diagnose the problem causing the high memory usage, you'll need to give us measurements taken when the high memory usage occurs.

Comment 12

[Dmitry]

ok, i will try) but as i said before, when extremely memory usage occurs i cant even login to my system.
when i close all tabs in firefox should free memory increase or not?

Comment 13

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

(In reply to Dmitry from comment #12)
> ok, i will try) but as i said before, when extremely memory usage occurs i
> cant even login to my system.

Please try to get it when the memory usage is high, but not so high that everything freezes. If you're on Linux, the suggestion in comment 5 sometimes works when visiting about:memory does not.

> when i close all tabs in firefox should free memory increase or not?

In theory, yes, but since there's a good chance that something's going wrong with your configuration, you might not see that in practice.

Comment 14

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

MemShrink:P3 until we have more information.

Comment 15

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

Have you had a chance to try again, Dmitry?

Comment 16

[Dmitry]

Hi, i added 2gb memory) and now i haven't swap by firefox, but firefox uses a lot of memory(freespace just 300-400Mb) i can attach new memory statistic

Comment 17

[Dmitry]

Attachment: memory-report_29_05_2014.json.gz

Comment 18

[Dmitry]

Attachment: about_support_29_05_2014.txt

Comment 19

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

(In reply to Dmitry from comment #17)
> Created attachment 8430535 [details]
> memory-report_29_05_2014.json.gz

"resident" is 861 MiB which isn't that unusual given that you've got over 20 tabs open.

This is a possible leak, but the amount of memory is small:

│  │   ├───0.36 MB (00.05%) ++ top(none)/detached/window(https://mail.google.com/_/scs/mail-static/_/js/k=gmail.main.ru.6UIhDpVSgWY.O/m=m_i,t/am=OCMOJ2TcXyjOcBd9QO2__x27pNjd34N4EWYAQdgJgP_N_h94PagPyo4N/rt=h/d=1/rs=AItRSTMUqpbJAiN-fnGoNqeiWrkVwIbB7w)

"heap-unclassified" and "heap-overhead" are a bit on the high side, but not alarmingly so. And I don't see anything else particularly notable. Nothing like the 4+ GiB mentioned in comment 0.

Comment 20

[Abe - QA (:Abe_LV)]

Changing the component while cleaning up the Untriaged list.
If this component is not the right fit, please assign to the appropriate one. Thanks

Comment 21

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Abe, the right component here was probably "Untriaged", since we're still waiting for data on what's going on here...

Comment 22

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Dmitry, do  you still see the issue?

Comment 23

[Abe - QA (:Abe_LV)]

Marking this as Resolved: Incomplete due to the lack of response from the reporter.
If anyone can still reproduce it on latest versions, feel free to reopen the issue and provide more information. Thanks

Comment 24

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Moving from Core::Untriaged to Core::General https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407598