214324 - Mozilla News huge memory consumption when clicking on newsgroups

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 210985

(MailNews Core :: Database, defect)

Description

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until April 26)]

Build 2003072204 WinXP

Hello,

When I click on the newsgroups I follow I see memory consumption jumping
up aproximatively the size of the msf file for this group. I routinely
follow 66 newsgroups which means that everytime I do a quick visit of
all these groups, dozens of MB are used for a little while. I have lots
of memory so it's not a problem but I imagine that people with less
memory are seeing their HD swapping like hell during this operation.

I have done the same test with NS4.8 to see if it loaded the snm files
too and it doesn't seem to do it. here is my testcase

With NS4.8 WinXP
- open NS4 and click successively these 3 newsgroups :
  - fr.comp.infosystemes.www.navigateurs * snm file = 3161KB
  - fr.comp.infosystemes.www.auteurs     * snm file = 3073KB
  - fr.comp.infosystemes.www.pages-perso * snm file = 1459KB

NS4 memory consumption before : 13.3 MB
NS4 memory consumption after  : 13.6 MB
no big memory jumps while clicking on groups


With Mozilla 2003072204 WinXP
- open Mozilla mail and click successively these 3 newsgroups :
  - fr.comp.infosystemes.www.navigateurs * msf file = 3097KB
  - fr.comp.infosystemes.www.auteurs     * msf file = 1298KB
  - fr.comp.infosystemes.www.pages-perso * msf file = 1675KB

Moz memory consumption before                : 33.3 MB
Moz memory consumption just after            : 42.8 MB
Moz memory consumption after 30 seconds idle : 39.8 MB
big memory jumps while clicking on groups

After about one minute, all Mozilla windows closed apart from this compose
window, the task manager still shows a memory use of 37MB.

It looks like NS4 was just quickly reading the headers of its snm file when you
clicked on a newsgroup while Mozilla is loading the whole msf file in memory and
doesn't release all the memory when it's done. Couldn't we access the data like
NS4 did ? It looked much more efficient, especially if we are leaking memory on
this kind of operation.

pascal

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

dup

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 210985 ***