1399207 - Memory leak loading gmail while browser console is open

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: Console, defect, P3)

Description

[Merike Sell (:merike)]

Seeing ca 2G leaking both on release and beta channel. After about 10-15 seconds the memory is released again. When 2G is not available Firefox crashes.

So far the necessary conditions seem to be the following:
* open any gmail page while logged in (doesn't matter if inbox, all mail, settings page etc)
* have browser console open before doing so (Ctrl+Shift+J)
* have a xul extension installed and enabled, for example Expiry Canary worked as a trigger in a new profile

The above was enough for me to repro in new profiles, with 2 gmail accounts on both Win and Linux.

With the end of XUL extensions coming this bug may or may not matter in terms of fixing but since I don't know what the root cause is, filing any way. Also, it is affecting current stable which is annoying.

Comment 1

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

Hello Merike,

Sorry for the long delay on this.
Are you still experiencing this issue ? If yes, how can I experience it myself (how do I do to see that memory is not released) ?

Also, I'm curious what "ca 2G" is ?

Thanks !

Comment 2

[Merike Sell (:merike)]

2G meant that 2GB of additional memory was used when loading a single gmail tab. It was released afterwards but the spike was big enough to crash Firefox as I didn't always have this much free memory available. Perhaps not strictly a leak but unreasonably large memory usage still.

I haven't seen it since XUL addons went down the train in beta channel as I'm usually not using stable channel for most browsing. I don't know if it was leaking in addon code or in underlying API code in Firefox itself. Possibly if web extensions have or will have access to similar API-s like Expiry Canary was using the issue might reappear. So far I haven't seen anything that provides similar functionality :(

So nothing to fix at the moment.