1298981 - Memory usage continually increasing on ci.centos.org

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Laurentiu Pancescu]

Attachment: memory-report.json.gz

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0
Build ID: 20160829030202

Steps to reproduce:

1. Install Firefox Nightly
2. Create a new profile from the Profile Manager
3. Close the default tabs that Firefox opens by default
4. Configure the new tab page to be blank
4. Quit Nightly
5. Start Nightly again (this time it shows just an empty tab)
6. Open https://ci.centos.org (a Jenkins instance) and just let it open, without performing any action.


Actual results:

Immediately after step 6, Activity Monitor shows two Firefox processes, Nightly (taking 224 MB of memory) and Nightly Web Content (122 MB). I could observe the memory consumption of the Web Content process increasing constantly. After around 7 hours, it reached 1.78 GB.

I first noticed this with Firefox "Release", using my normal profile (which is why I tried to reproduce it with Nightly, without any extensions). Firefox 48.0.2 isn't multiprocess on my Mac mini, and the memory consumption increased from 910 MB to 2.95 GB. "about:memory" reported 1.6GB for ci.centos.org, out of which 1.2 GB in "orphaned DOM nodes". After clicking "minimize memory usage" twice, the memory usage dropped to 970 MB. In Nightly, clicking the same button seems to have no effect.


Expected results:

The memory usage should not increase indefinitely. I'm not sure if the Jenkins web UI doesn't do something strange: the Safari memory usage also increases over time, going from 67 MB to more than 1 GB over about two and a half hours (Safari had uBlock installed, though).

Comment 1

[Laurentiu Pancescu]

Attachment: Memory report after "minimize memory usage"

Comment 2

[Laurentiu Pancescu]

Attachment: Contents of about:support

Comment 3

[Laurentiu Pancescu]

Chrome's memory usage also seems to continually increase, going from 120MB to 1.7GB in less than 3 hours.  I suspect something is wrong with Jenkins' code, not Firefox - I found a bug report rom 2014 in the Jenkins tracker, still unresolved:

https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-10912

Should we close this bug?

Comment 4

[Timothy Nikkel (:tnikkel)]

The memory report has 1GB of orphan nodes, that can be a sign that the page is leaking nodes.

Comment 5

[Laurentiu Pancescu]

I saw that the Developer Tools support taking heap snapshots and comparing them, and it can also track memory allocations. I'll give it a try with Firefox Developer Edition. I remembered there was an article on MDN about memory leaks:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Memory_Management

Comment 6

[Vlad Bacia-Mociran [:VladB]]

Based on comment 3 & comment 4, I am closing this issue as INVALID.