Closed Bug 158317 Opened 22 years ago Closed 19 years ago

Mozilla uses a lot of Virtual memory while I still have more than 100MB free physical RAM

Categories

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, defect)

Product:
SeaMonkey
Component:
UI Design
Platform:
x86
Windows XP
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
major

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: pascalc, Assigned: jag+mozilla)

Details

(Keywords: memory-footprint)

Attachments

(1 file)

mail containing gifs that let virtual memory explode
188.01 KB, application/octet-stream
Details 
Ok, I don't know whether this is a valid bug, it could perfectly be the
consequence of one of the many performance bugs already filed. But I could not
find any that best described the problem.

I have a rather powerful setup (athlon 1700XP with 256MB RAM). I have noticed
that Mozilla uses a lot of RAM with time, forcing me to quit it because after
hours of heavy use, it spends its time swapping on my hard drive. The problem is
that according to WinXP Task manager, Mozilla uses a LOT of virtual memory while
I still have most of my Physical RAM unused. When I launch it, the TM tells me
that Mozilla.exe is using 20MB and 12MB Virtual memory while I still have 150MB
free physical RAM. After 5 mns of surfing,  the numbers climb to 30MB of memory
use and 50MB of virtual memory use. The Virtual Memory number increases much
faster than The Memory Use number and I frequently have Mozilla using more than
70MB of Virtual memory while there is almost no other application running and
the Task manager tells me that most of my physical RAM is free.

Mozilla is the only task (with Photoshop) using that much virtual memory, I have
the impression that it uses the virtual memory but never releases it. If I close
all navigator windows and only let the MailNEws window open, There is no change
in Virtual Memory use. I have also noticed that minimizing Mozilla windows to
the task bar and maximizing them afterwards releases most of the RAM used by
Mozilla but not the Virtual Memory used.

My build ID is 2002071408 but I've been seeing this for a long time.  I see it
without the Java plugin being loaded, and HTTP pipelining is also disabled.
maybe dupe to Bug 123191 ?
-> XP APPS

looks related to bug 76831
.
Assignee: Matti → sgehani
Component: Browser-General → XP Apps
QA Contact: asa → paw
There definitely is a problem in the way Mozilla manages virtual memory ! I just
came back to my computer after a few hours away and WinXP was displaying a
warning message saying that it had to enlarge the size of the Virtual Memory
space on the disk, I looked at the Task manager and Mozilla was using 545 MB of
virtual memory !! There was only 2 mozilla windows open.

Build ID : 2002072204

I am marking this bug as new since I still can't find a duplicate and I
reproduced the bug (in fact, its getting worse) with a newer build. All the
other memory bugs filed are about a specific page causing a sky-rocketting
memory consumption. My problem seems not to be caused by a specific page, I have
the impression that the problem appears when Windows is in idle mode. I am not
even sure that this is caused by the browser component since I always have the
mail window open.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Summary: Mozilla uses a lot of Virtual memory while I still have more than 100MB free phrical RAM → Mozilla uses a lot of Virtual memory while I still have more than 100MB free physical RAM
Management of virtual memory is done by the OS, not by Mozilla, you know...  The
whole point of virtual memory is that app developers don't have to worry about
where their memory is coming from.
It might help if mozilla called SetProcessWorkingSetSize (to 50MB or more ;-).

But I think it requires Administrator priviliges (not that anyone uses NT/W2K
without them ;)
Boris, I am not a computer scientist and do not know anything about how WinXP
manages Virtual memory, however what I see is that one particular application,
sometimes needs more than 500MB of memory after a few hours remaining open with
two windows open, one for my mail and one for the browser. According to windows
task manager, most of the memory wasted by Mozilla is virtual memory. So you can
tell me that if Mozilla needs more than 500MB memory after a few hours of
inactivity is because of my OS, personnally I call it a memory leak.
Does this happen with any specific web page? Is there any commonality of the
pages you see this on. I'm thinking of something like animated gif's and such.

Something to realize is that task manager's Mem Usage is the just the working
set, and the VM Size doesn't included shared stuff. It's all rather complex,
unfortunately. 

And to complicate issues much of Mozilla is managed by GC, so you aren't going
to see a memory reduction until a GC occurs. And to further obscure things, the
heap logic provided by MS may not even release that memory back to the OS if it
is rather fragmented.

Not saying what you're seeing isn't a valid issue that needs to be addressed by
Mozilla, just that it's not an easy thing to diagnose and determine the real
culprit.
The problem happened three times with different builds so I guess that it is
either related to a page I visit frequently or to something I do with the Mail
component but I could not blame any specific page for the moment. If I can find
a specific page causing this memory leak I will post it here. I don't visit
pages with java applets, flash animations or many graphics, I tend to visit
pages mostly made up of text (Newspapers, bugzilla reports, forums...).
On some of the recent builds, running on a 1.7GHz box with 130 MB of RAM, I get
a message when I start up Mozilla from windows. This message says that my
Virtual Memory is too low and that windows is adjusting the pagefile size. After
this, Mozilla hangs at the splash screen and does absolutely nothing until the
process is killed. Before killing the process and looking at the task manager,
I'm noticing it report that mozilla.exe, while utilizing 00% of the processor
and over 80 MB of RAM, which is more than any other app running on the computer.
The same problem occurs under WindowsNT 4.0. Solution (so far) kill
"mozilla.exe" in task manager and restart Mozilla. This solution (so far NEVER
failed. Most of the times I start Mozilla everything works fine but one out of
twenty starts (just to give an idea) fails. Task manager shows 0% CPU usage and
180MB memory usage for approx. 30 seconds then either memory usage drops to 18MB
and Mozilla starts up or stays at approx. 100MB and nothing happens.

Versions tested: 1.01  1.1 1.2b

Please add NT 4.0 to the OS.

The problem does nor occur on Win95 and with Linux-versions.
For the record, a september post on netscape.public.mozilla.performance
describes a similar problem on Linux, here is what is said :

"I have noticed this too.
After being in mozilla for a week or so, having opened and closed 
several hundred tabs/windows and returning to only one or two tabs, 
Mozillas memory usage is approximately 800MB (!!), which is pretty much 
my entire swap space.

The only way I've managed to clear this is to regularly kill mozilla and 
reload it, a major pain in the neck if you use it extensively.

Greg"
The example is a mail containing gifs. When the window showing the mail has
focus, the used memory increases at a pace of hundreds of KB/s; hiding/closing
the window does not free memory.
To demonstrate: place the file in 
Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\abcde.slt\Mail\Local Folders 
(eventually add the empty .msf file) and open the mail in the mail client.
Hope this example can help find the cause of the problem.
I frequently see the same problems mentioned in comments 10 and 11 - starting
Mozilla shows the splash screen, and mozilla.exe climbs up to 100+MB memory
usage, usually topping out at about 130MB and then dropping to ~8MB, and the
cycle repeats until the process is killed.  I haven't managed to find any
pattern, but I'd say that the problem occurs on the order of 1 out of every 5
starts.  My usage pattern usually keeps the browser open for a few hours at a
time, though.

I've seen this with Mozilla 1.2 release on Windows 2000.  I've just switched
over to the 2002113004 nightly; I'll return with any related problems I
encounter with that.

-e
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212
Windows XP, SP1
Celeron 1.2GHz, 256MB RAM

I have not been able to squeeze out a reproducible test case for this, but I've
*definately* been cramped by this. The two most recent episodes with this bug
almost brought the system to a halt...in both instances, I was forced to kill
mozilla with the task manager after grabbing these stats before each kill:

[mem usage:      16,504K
peak mem usage:  165,764K
VM size:         542,104K}

[mem usage:      45,880K
peak mem usage:  193,372K
VM size:         814,352K]

yes, these are the stats for mozilla.exe as reported by Windows Task Manager
before killing mozilla the last two instances of this bug. maybe I should look
through the plethora of memory leak bugs to see if this would better fit within
a different bug.
Have the same problems. After browsing for quite a while windows tries to
increase  the virtual memory. The system is stuck and the only way to go on is
to kill Mozilla. Shortly before this happens I noticed a few times that all
controls become invisible but are still functional if you manage to click them.
I had/have this problem with Mozilla 1.2 and Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT
5.0; de-AT; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212 on Windows 2000 SP3.

I did NOT encounter that problem with Netscape 7.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; de-DE; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823
Netscape/7.0 (CK-1LycosDE09)

Maybe it's a dupe of bug 110048, bug 81446 or another.

Reporter, have you tried Mozilla 1.4a or later (1.4b is just around the corner)
? We've had many improvements in this area.
I regularly follow builds and currently have build 2003043008 but I now have
difficulties to say if the problem is still there because my machine was
upgraded and now has 768 MB physical ram. At the moment, Mozilla is using 160 MB
Ram and 140 MB virtual memory (5 tabs plus mail open).
Hi everyone,

I believe i have the same problem with all of you who mention VM is running low.
I tried, Mozilla v1.2.1, 1.3.1 and the latest build 1.4 (downloaded yesterday).
All of them has the same problem.  my setup is P4-2.4GHz, 256mb RAM. Win-XP 
home edition.
After I browser some sites with a lot of applets, or a lot big pictures.
The VM will increase rapidly, from the 120MB to 1024GB!!  Yeah, I set my VM 
limit to 1024GB, and it still wants more.  The problem can be reproduce when I 
visit the similiar site.  Especially those forum type sites with a lot of 
applet or inter-active feature.  What make it worse is, if thread has picture 
attach/post on to it, the VM will jump very fast.  VM can jump to 750MB in just 
30 min.  
I have to kill the whole program in order to escape for the big big lag. 

I think it is a bug, is it?   or it is a Windows VM issue?
I tried in both XP and NT environment, something happened.  
 
Can't give version number as Help->About is broken in this build, but it's
approximately 1.5.0 build ID 2003091604

Here is a reproducable test case on a Pentium III with 192 MB RAM and Windows XP
SP1:

Before test:  Mem Usage=38840K, VM Size=28076K

Load a LARGE .jpg file such as:
http://www.spaceimaging.com/gallery/spacepics/DIA_SI_09_05_03.jpg

The browser will struggle to load the image and now your memory usage is as
follows (as your hard disk cries for mercy):

After test:  Mem Usage: 136029K, VM Size=387283K (!)

I should also note that closing that tab or moving to another web page will NOT
release the memory--only closing the browser will do that.

There are other times that VM usage goes through the roof (i.e. when viewing
Adobe Acrobat images with the browser plugin), but they are more subtle than in
this example.

Same here.  I'm using Windows XP and Mozilla, whether under Firebird or Mozilla
proper, takes forever to swap in if you've minimized it for quite a while. 
Could the commonality be that people experiencing this problem are using fixed
sized swap spaces?
I see this problem with Win2k and Mozilla/Firebird/Thunderbird - generally equal
amounts of VM and physical memory in use at any given time.

My PC's spec: http://www.legolas.com/mikes/mypc.txt
Product: Core → Mozilla Application Suite
I wish to report the following data:

I'm running Windows XP SP2 with NO virtual memory, in a system with 1GB of RAM.
I'm using Mozilla 1.8b, and I'm measuring the memory usage through the "private
bytes" column of Process Explorer (www.sysinternals.com).

After having used Mozilla on and off for a few days for browsing and reading
mail, without closing it, I closed all tabs of the browser window except one, in
which I entered the URL "about:blank". I also closed the mail window and cleared
the cache in the preferences. The only Mozilla window that was left was the one
showing "about:blank". After this, Process Manager indicated a use of 174472
kbytes by Mozilla. Minimizing Mozilla made only a very slight change in this
figure. I then closed Mozilla and started it again, and again opened
"about:blank" in a single tab of a browser window. The memory usage indication
given by Process Explorer was then 17588 kbytes.

I think this is a clear indication of some memory management problem in Mozilla.
For some special reasons, I don't use virtual memory in my system. This behavior
of Mozilla means that I have to close it and restart it every few days, to
prevent it from eating up too much RAM.
I would agree. This bug started heading down that path for example Comment #13, but now so much time has elapsed the the older reports are probably not accurate anymore.

If someone has a specific case that causes Virtual Memory usage issues then see if there's an existing bug and then add any additional comments. If not then file a bug. If there's nothing specific, reporting it just creates noise.

Anyone know what the tracking bug for memory usage is?

This one should probably be closed.
In reply to comment #25)
>
> Anyone know what the tracking bug for memory usage is?

There is not a single bug, and the only meta/tracking bugs I found with a simple search are 
 bug 124608 Core Imagelib memory usage issues
 bug 67618 Core Reduce number of memory allocations at startup
 bug 320915 Core 1.8 memory leak campaign (recent, as you can see)

A rather "global" tracker is 
 Bug 203448 Matic's performance tracker

Bug 105370 huge memory use loading a 2M animated GIF

(
Not sure what a better resolution is. Nothing's been fixed, the bug isn't invalid per se, I'm sure there still are leaks and we still use a lot of virtual memory. We're not going to fix it in this bug (on account of it being too vague), so wontfix.

Is there really no tracking bug for memory usage issues? Should one be filed?
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 19 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
(In reply to comment #27)
> Is there really no tracking bug for memory usage issues? 

looked again - no SM bugs have "memory" in the summary and are meta or track dependencies. Bug 213534 may be good bug to gripe in, but accomplishes little if anything - but should probably be left open so people don't spam other bugs.


>Should one be filed?

I'd think only if there is a drive to identify and fix what is tracked.  And  that may require a few people to get comfy with the memory and performance profile tools.
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.

Attachment

General

Creator:
Created:
Updated:
Size: