1188037 - Need manual graphics testing for OOM conditions

Status: NEW

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Vladan Djeric (:vladan)]

Background:

I've been seeing graphics glitches (black tabs, window not repainting) on my various Windows machines very frequently over the last couple of months.

Today, I tried to load a profile in the Gecko profiler while the system was under memory pressure, got a JS "Out of memory" error in the DevTools console, and as soon as I switched to another tab, the tab was completely black and would only repaint portions of the page when I moused over them (similar to past issues). This is very similar to past gfx glitches I've experienced.
about:memory showed that vsize is close to 4GB on this 32-bit Aurora build.

Jeff's suggestion: Manually test how gfx behaves during OOMs and potentially fix or change the behaviour. 

I'm in favour of this suggestion, and I would argue that crashing, or asking the user to restart, or even forcefully unloading some of his background tabs is preferrable to bizarre graphics glitches.

Comment 1

[Milan Sreckovic [:milan] (needinfo for best results)]

Sounds reasonable - what's the best way to get us into the "close to OOM" state?  Do we have developer tools for this?

Comment 2

[Vladan Djeric (:vladan)]

I was able to reproduce Firefox OOM reliably by opening a very brief profile in process-per-tab e10s with a dozen content processes :)

You could also write a toy Firefox extension or even a devtools snippet to allocate a lot of huge JS objects.

Seems like a job for an intern? Yours or mine :)

Comment 3

[Vladan Djeric (:vladan)]

Basically just fork this https://github.com/luser/crashme to allocate a whole bunch of large JS objects until allocations fail

Comment 4

[(Away)]

(In reply to Vladan Djeric (:vladan) -- please needinfo! from comment #3)
> Basically just fork this https://github.com/luser/crashme to allocate a
> whole bunch of large JS objects until allocations fail

Or VirtualAlloc if you want to do it on the C++ side of the addon.

Comment 5

[Milan Sreckovic [:milan] (needinfo for best results)]

Assigning to Jeff so that we track any ideas we have on this topic.