1740156 - firefox nightly permits poorly coded site to consume all memory and irretrievably wedge the system

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Performance, defect)

Description

[gregrwm]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:96.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/96.0

Steps to reproduce:

go to: http://portal.examfx.com

just let it sit there.

Actual results:

within 60min all 8gb ram and 2gb swap on my system have been consumed, and the system becomes so tightly wedged that not even a mere bash prompt can respond.

Expected results:

somehow firefox should forestall this, perhaps a dialog, say what's happening, preferably pause the page in case the person isn't watching at the moment, and present options, eg close the tab, or let it continue and likely wedge the system if it continues the way it's going.

Comment 1

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Performance' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[gregrwm]

fascinating. just now i was watching htop as all memory and half my swap was consumed, at that point i entered a google search in the task bar, which took a bit of time, not surprising since it was thrashing, but the totally surprising part is first the examfx.com page (see the description above) was replaced by the google search result page, which displayed just fine, but memory usage according to htop still didn't budge, then swap usage shot up to the top, htop was wedged for several seconds, then memory usage dropped way down to what you'd expect, like between only 1 or 2 gig, and then the google search result page was replaced with the tab crash reporter. fascinating. so apparently, if we take into account how much memory will be required to recover, we're out of memory well before we're out of memory!

Comment 3

[gregrwm]

it does seem odd that the system gets irretrievably wedged with no apparent OOM kill having happened. it's just a standard ubuntu 20.04 kernel.

Comment 4

[gregrwm]

it just so happens i left
https://www.slant.co/topics/6289/viewpoints/7/~rolling-release-linux-distributions~manjaro
open in a window i wasn't using all day and it crashed. same thing happened yesterday. i submitted the automatic "Report this tab" both times, with today's submission including these comments:

i saw it happen this time. the slant.co page was left in a window i wasn't using all day. it was slowly consuming ram. when it just crashed, several gig of ram were freed. i'm curious if this is related to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1740156 and why this page(
https://www.slant.co/topics/6289/viewpoints/7/~rolling-release-linux-distributions~manjaro) crashes but that page(portal.examfx.com) wedges the system instead??

Comment 5

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

(In reply to gregrwm from comment #4)

it just so happens i left
https://www.slant.co/topics/6289/viewpoints/7/~rolling-release-linux-distributions~manjaro
open in a window i wasn't using all day and it crashed. same thing happened yesterday. i submitted the automatic "Report this tab" both times,

Could you go to about:crashes, find some of these reports, and post the links here? Maybe this can help us find out what's going on.

Comment 6

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

A needinfo is requested from the reporter, however, the reporter is inactive on Bugzilla. Given that the bug is still UNCONFIRMED, closing the bug as incomplete.

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