1571692 - Firefox uses excessive amount of memory, which is mostly heap-unclassified

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: General, defect, P5)

Description

[glebignatieff]

Attachment: memory-report.json.gz

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

Unfortunately, nothing special. I had a couple of PDFs opened and used Google Maps

Actual results:

At some point my laptop started to freeze, I opened htop and saw that the main Firefox process consumes about 10 Gb of virtual memory. A huge chunk of the allocated memory is heap-unclassified. I closed all the tabs, but it didn't help and neither GC explicit call helped

Expected results:

Memory usage should have reduced

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The priority flag is not set for this bug.
:jonco, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 3

[Jon Coppeard (:jonco)]

(In reply to glebignatieff from comment #0)

A huge chunk of the allocated memory is heap-unclassified. I closed all the tabs, but it didn't help and neither GC explicit call helped

From the memory report we have 6.8GB / 7.1GB heap-unclassified (!). JS GC heap is only ~30MB. It doesn't look like a GC issue specifically, more like some kind of leak.

glebignatieff, did you see this again? Any way we can reproduce this?

Comment 4

[glebignatieff]

(In reply to Jon Coppeard (:jonco) from comment #3)

(In reply to glebignatieff from comment #0)

A huge chunk of the allocated memory is heap-unclassified. I closed all the tabs, but it didn't help and neither GC explicit call helped

From the memory report we have 6.8GB / 7.1GB heap-unclassified (!). JS GC heap is only ~30MB. It doesn't look like a GC issue specifically, more like some kind of leak.

glebignatieff, did you see this again? Any way we can reproduce this?

Unfortunately, it's "No" for the both questions :/ I'll leave a comment here, if encounter this issue again

Comment 5

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

Unfortunately leaks that can't be reproduced and only show up as heap-unclassified are going to be hard to fix. If you see this regularly, you can try running in safe mode, which will disable addons. Addons can sometimes be the cause of leaks. PDFs and Google Maps both can use tons of image data, so that might be the cause somehow.

Comment 6

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

Without more information to reproduce this issue, we're not going to be able to fix this, unfortunately.