1825686 - Memory leak in YouTube live streams with Video Download Helper extension

Status: NEW

(WebExtensions :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[famicom4]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/111.0

Steps to reproduce:

I played a YouTube live stream with chat enabled and Video Download Helper installed. I also have the "companion app installed" to help download HLS files.

Actual results:

There is huge memory leak, sometimes making the whole system slow and unresponsive.

This has been extensively discussed in a recent GitHub issue report with screenshots showing the gravity of the problem. Here:
https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/116222

Expected results:

YouTube live stream play normally with chat interaction without taking all system RAM.

This has been discussed here: https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/116222

After removing the Video Download Helper extension I could no longer reproduce the leak, so I was told to file a new bug report now mentioning the association with the Video Download Helper extension. I also have their "companion app" installed as suggested to download HLS videos with the extension.

Comment 1

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Audio/Video: Playback' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Do you know whether Chrome reproduces with the Video Download Helper extension installed?

Comment 3

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

I looked at the memory report in one of the comments on the WebCompat issue (you have to unzip the memory report to get something that about:memory can load).

The memory usage is all in JS in the WebExtensions process, so I'm going to move this bug to the WebExtensions component. I'd normally say this is simply an issue with the addon, but they said they aren't experiencing the same issue with Chrome, so maybe there's something we can improve.

Comment 4

[Alex Cornestean]

Hello,

I reproduced the issue on the latest Firefox Release (112.0.2/20230424110519) under Windows 10 x64, on two separate PCs – on one, the companion app was installed and on the other the companion app was not installed.

On the PC without the companion app installed, the baseline for RAM usage was at about 1.5 GB immediately after accessing a live stream with, I would reckon, a moderate chat activity.
After some time, usage went to a little over 6 GB RAM and from what I could tell it would have continued to increase.
However, I then disabled the add-on and after a short period of time usage stabilized at around 5 GB RAM.

On the PC with the companion app installed, the baseline for RAM usage was at about 700 MB after accessing the same live stream and it started to slowly increase until 10 GB RAM when I disabled the add-on.
After disabling the add-on, usage dropped to 6-6.3 GB RAM and stabilized there, with only a few additional spikes to 9 GB before finally settling again to 6-6.3 GB.

I also observed that when the chat activity intensified, RAM usage would pick up.

Additionally, the memory leak appears to be accentuated by the companion app, as you can see from the info above.

Comment 5

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:zombie, could you have a look please?

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