163802 - Searching with google consumes huge memory

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, defect)

Description

[ABi]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020529
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020529

I use an X terminal connected to a Linux RH6.2 server. X terminals have limited
X memory (e.g. 16 or 32 MB). If I search with Google Mozilla it consumes nearly
6 MB of X memory which isn't freed if I leave Google. If that huge memory block
isn't present any more, Mozilla crashes. Because Mozilla doesn't free the X
memory the available space gets smaller and smaller, thus there is no X memory
for other apps and I have to reboot. This problem is very X terminal specific by
nevertheless annoying. This problem occurs even if Mozilla's search meachanism
is not involved but only the search button of the google web page is pressed.
Can one completely switch off that search feature?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.open google web page
2.enter a word to search for
3.press search button of web page
4.view memory statistics of X terminal

Actual Results:  
Mozilla consumes nearly 6 MB X memory or crashes if that huge block isn't free yet

Expected Results:  
simply show the search result page (I can live w/o search feature) and definetly
NOT crash (may be error message?)

Comment 1

[Andrew Schultz]

this sounds like bug 120712, but I don't think Google's default hits/page (10)
is enough to see that bug.  Did you configure Google to return lots of hits per
page?

Comment 2

[ABi]

Yes, I have configured Goggle to return 100 results per page, but that is not
the problem. I tried it with 10 results per page and the behaviour is all the
same. I think it is more related to bug 154967 and bug 161126.

Comment 3

[Kenneth Herron]

ABi, the behavior you're describing is high memory usage within the X server
process. Bugs 120712, 154967, and 161126 are all about memory usage within the
mozilla process. There's no reason to believe these would be related.

When I search for "Kyocera" from the google home page, the results page is
rendered in UTF-8, and the third hit is a page in japanese, using japanese
characters. When I perform the same search using the mozilla search button, the
page is in ISO-8859-1 and the third result says "The summary for this Japanese
page contains characters that cannot be correctly displayed in this
language/character set." So, in one case, my X server had to load a japanese
font to display part of a page; in the other it didn't.

It's possible that the searches you're doing are forcing your X terminal to load
extra fonts, using up its memory. Here are some things you can try:

1) You said you saw the increased memory usage even when using mozilla's
built-in search feature. Please update your copy of mozilla and try this again.
Once the page is loaded, select View->Page Info->General, you should see the
content-type for the page. Please note the character set. Also, look through the
page for results in using other character sets (oriental, cryllic, etc).

2) From the google home page, go into preferences and set a search language
preference.

3) See if you can find out what fonts your X terminal is loading.

Please see what you can find out and update this report.

--> XP Apps. Search is just for the built-in search, and you say the same thing
happens from the google home page.

Comment 4

[ABi]

I wait a long time because I had more important things to do but this morning I
updated to 1.0.1 - and this problem is gone.

To Kenneth's questions (both searches done with "Kyocera":
If I search Google from the built-in search bar I get ISO-8859-1 page and it
consumes about 100kByte X-Memory (which is fairly ok :-) ).
If I search from within Google I get a UTF-8 page with japanese font and it
consumes about 6MB X-Memory (loaded fonts: jisx).

With 1.0.0 Mozilla crashed even if I searched for issues that dodn't force
Mozilla to load special fonts.

So I think this problem is SOLVED.