1305796 - quickly increasing memory usage to over 8gb for single process

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Graphics: Layers, defect)

Description

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Attachment: taskmgr showing about:performance and taskmgr showing FF 10gb process

On Saturday 9/24 the memory usage of one of the firefox processes starting quickly increasing. AFAICT it started with no actions on my part. I don't know how much memory was being used when it started increasing, but a reasonable guess is 3-4GB.  I noticed it at about 8gb and I killed firefox at 10+gb and increasing. Attached will be FF memory report, and screen shot with taskmgr and about:performance showing all the process IDs' memory usage.

I wasn't able to determine which tab or memory area is involved - I'm hoping someone can tell me.

This was with Nightly build 20160914030200 on win7. I had been running 20160914030200 for 10 days.  IPC processes = 9


Also, about:performance memory info is wrong for two of the process IDs:  
1. about:performance doesn't list process ID 8968 and 11984 (the one using 10gb at the time of the screen shot) - one must be the parent process, so one is missing from the list 
2. taskmgr shows a 10+gb and 1.4gb process, but about:performance has no process in this range of memory usage

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Attachment: FF 8gb memory troubleshooting.txt

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Attachment: 8gb-process-memory-report.json.gz

Comment 3

[Vlad Bacia-Mociran [:VladB]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20161013030204

Hello Wayne, from the attached memory log I can see that you have about 20 enabled extensions, plus 50 that are disabled. This high memory usage can be caused by the large number of extensions installed in your browser. In order to avoid these situations, here (https://goo.gl/OGO3Wo) is an article from Mozilla support on how to fix the high memory usage. 

Can you please retest this using latest Nightly build (https://nightly.mozilla.org/) and report back the results ? When doing this, please use a new clean Firefox profile, maybe even safe mode, to eliminate custom settings as a possible cause (https://goo.gl/PNe90E).

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I appreciate your response. However, I don't anticipate running in a clean profile where I know the problem won't reproduce, in part because I've only seen this problem once in a year running basically the same addons. In short, it's not reproducible. But it was extreme - I don't remember the time period preceisely but I think the rate of increase was like 1G per 5 minutes - in just ONE process.

The purpose of submitting my bug report is to have someone look at the memory report to determine what type of memory was likely increasing so quickly and thus help narrow what URL or addon or further tests might be warranted, and also determine whether the memory report was even useful - and if not then perhaps file followup bugs to fix the memory reporting.

Comment 5

[Vlad Bacia-Mociran [:VladB]]

From the `Failure Log`, I can see many errors for `CP+[GFX1-]: Refresh driver waiting for the compositor for59.0002 seconds`. This issue seems to be related with Bug 1302713.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Indeed - could  be related. On the other hand, none of them mention memory usage as a symptom. But if I had let the memory increase perhaps it would have crashed OOM - like for these bugs  https://mzl.la/2dInwNB

Comment 7

[Julien Cristau [:jcristau]]

Too late for firefox 52, mass-wontfix.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I haven't seen this problem in a long time