1370962 - Hardware Acceleration causes gigantic RAM consumption on a website

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Graphics, defect, P3)

Description

[max.langhof]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Build ID: 20170518000419

Steps to reproduce:

1. Turn off all extensions and custom themes.
2. Enable hardware acceleration.
3. Visit http://web.whatsapp.com/ and connect with phone.
4. Chat screen starts loading...


Actual results:

(w/ hardware acceleration turned on)
http://i.imgur.com/I4dz7kG.png
Memory usage immediately shoots through all roofs, subsequent paging renders the entire system almost inoperable (including freezing mouse etc.). I killed Firefox at the end and memory usage immediately went down again.
Notably, Firefox is not reported as eating all that memory - no process is.


Expected results:

(w/ hardware acceleration turned off or using safe mode)
http://i.imgur.com/vCgHFBe.png


**Additional Info:**
This is the first and only website I have observed this problem on. It is 100% consistent but has not actually led to crashes of any sorts yet (besides having to find a way to exit the chat screen in order to end the system freezing).

Here is the about:support section on graphics:
https://i.imgur.com/HRVCyPc.png
I am using a Surface Pro 3 for that matter.

Comment 1

[Loic]

If you use Win 10 on this machine, please, update your drivers, they are too old.

And is it reproducible with a clean profile?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles

Comment 2

[max.langhof]

I am using Win 8.

As per request, I did the following:
1. Create a new, clean profile and start Firefox with it.
2. Ensure HW acceleration is on.
3. Visit web.whatsapp.com and enter the chat view.

Upon doing this the first time, some part of the rendering system seems to have silently crashed: The page (and all other pages I tried to open) are rendered as solid black. The FF menu/toolbars and any other applications are unaffected. Judging by the cursor appearance changes, the pages themselves still seem functional, just not visible.

4. I closed and restarted Firefox, again on this clean profile (but without deleting/recreating it), repeated step 3 and this time was able to enter the chat view and interact with it normally for a few seconds. Then the original problem appeared again (massive RAM consumption).

5. Repeating step 4, I was once again able to interact normally for a few moments, this time followed by the rendering issue described in step 3.

6. Repeating step 4 another time, the chat view rendered correctly again, although I could observe a significant (permanent) increase in RAM usage (500+ MB) every time a conversation was selected - RAM usage stayed constant unless I interacted with the page. It appears that each interaction may trigger the "black page" rendering issue along the RAM hogging, including the initial chat view loading (which consumes > 1 GB of memory).

So there is a difference with a clean profile, but mainly in delaying the onset of the paging/OoM situation.


I will look into updating drivers.

Comment 3

[max.langhof]

I have updated my graphics drivers to the latest (and final) available ones for Win 8.1: http://i.imgur.com/r7JEFzK.png

Partial success: I can now at least reach the chat view with my normal FF profile without instantly freezing up (albeit still with very high memory consumption). The page is still wholly unusable though because as soon as I start typing a message, it blows up my RAM again. No black pages observed in either clean or normal profile though.

The issue definitely still persists.