1502664 - Firefox process types aren't clear in task manager

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: about:memory, defect, P3)

Description

[Infant Vinay P]

Attachment: firefox65a1-memoryusage.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:65.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0

Steps to reproduce:

This is with Mozilla Firefox Nightly 65.0a1

I am running a session of about 3 browser tabs on Windows 10 and there is hardly any heavy browser data on any of these tabs. However the memory consumption is about 1GB+ and there are 8 processes for firefox running in the Windows Task Manager.

Attaching a screenshot here.


Actual results:

I do not have 8 tabs opened and yet there are 8 processes for Firefox Nightly.
Not sure how this is. Most probably an unexpected behavior.


Expected results:

I can understand that one tab maps to a running process on Windows. Maybe I am wrong. Need clarification here.

In any case, the memory consumption is abnormal for 2-3 running tabs (a search engine website and this mozilla bugzilla)

Comment 1

[Infant Vinay P]

Attachment: firefox-troubleshooting-raw-data

Comment 2

[Kanchan Kumari QA]

Hello Vinay, Thanks for the bug report and detailed STR. Could you please provide memory report (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance/about:memory) when you encounter this issue? This will help dev to look into the root cause of the issue. Thanks!

Comment 3

[Infant Vinay P]

Attachment: memory-task-manager-snapshot.png

screenshot of task manager

Comment 4

[Infant Vinay P]

Attachment: memory-report-nightly.json.gz

memory report as asked from the browser.

Comment 5

[Infant Vinay P]

Hi Kanchan

This issue happens everytime as far as I have seen. 

Here is the memory report you asked for. 
Also, I have attached another screenshot of task manager right now as I update this bug report.
Once more unusual memory usage and not the true number of tabs opened.

Hope this helps. Please let me know if you need anything else.

Please confirm if you received both the screenshot and the json file in gz format.

Comment 6

[Kanchan Kumari QA]

Thanks for providing the requested info! 

Hi erahm, can you please look into the attached memory report? Thanks!

Comment 7

[Eric Rahm [:erahm]]

There are 7 processes in the memory report:
 - 1 main (parent) process
 - 4 content processes
   - 3 of these are for loaded pages (yahoo, docker, mdn)
   - 1 is for a preallocated content process that will load the next URL you open
 - 1 gpu process
 - 1 web extension process

We currently limit the number of content processes to 8, but that doesn't count against other types such as gpu and web extension. Once 8 pages are loaded there should only be 8 content processes and we will no longer use a prealloacted process. I'd expect a total of 11 processes at that point. Please note also that defaulting to 8 content processes is currently nightly only.

Thanks for the report, I hope that helps explain everything. If you have specific concerns about memory overhead of certain pages can you please file a separate bug with steps to reproduce and a memory report?

It's possible we can do a better job of displaying the process type in task manager. mhowell do you have any idea how that works or know of someone who does?

Comment 8

[Molly Howell (she/her) (no longer active)]

As far as I know the Task Manager will only display the description string from the executable file's version info resource, or the file name if that isn't present, so it's always something baked into the file itself and can't be changed at runtime. I think in order to display something more informative we'd have to be using a different executable for each process type.