225222 - Memory leak in Mozilla took down system

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Matt Fago]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007

I loaded 5 tabs: Slashdot, two parishotels.com, www.verizonwireless.com and
www.attwireless.com. After browsing for a few minutes I went to bed. When I woke
up my computer was swapping frantically and every last byte of swap and RAM was
in use. The computer was essentially dead. I was eventually able to log on
remotely. Running "top" showed mozilla-bin using over 1300MB of memory (the
computer has 512MB physical). 

Not sure what other information I can give (unfortunately). I needed to take my
computer (a laptop) into work, so I did a remote shutdown.

The urls:
http://www.verizonwireless.com/ics/plsql/plan_detail.intro?p_hdr_id=176393775&p_plan_category_id=30305&p_section=SHOP
http://www.slashdot.org
http://www.attwireless.com/personal/plans/sharedplans.jhtml?sharedplanpage=familynational

two tabs somewhere at: http://www.parishotels.com

I also had Mail open. I did not have a message window open, and have Java and
plugins turned off in Mail. The webpages did not seem to be running Flash or
anything, but I could be wrong.

Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:


Actual Results:  
Mozilla ate RAM and swap and forced me to reboot the machine.

Expected Results:  
No leak?

SuSE 8.2

Comment 1

[Luis B. Almeida]

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.

Comment 2

[Moritz Kaiser]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20051018 Firefox/1.6a1

Same Symptoms as described. There are many sites which make firefox eat all the memory. In my case I had tabs open with some articles at http://www.heise.de for several days.
Firefox consumed memory until the kernel hit the red button and killed firefox along with some other processes like X and the windowmanager.

The behaviour of firefox worsenes if animated gifs are on Websites displayed in Tabs. Memory consumption grows quickly, so sometimes you run dry after only 24 hours of usage, depending on size of system memory. 

The memory consumption of the X-server increases along with firefox and drops after terminating firefox. So perhaps xpixmap caches or something similar is involved into this issue.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20051018 Firefox/1.6a1
> 
> Same Symptoms as described. There are many sites which make firefox eat all the
> memory. In my case I had tabs open with some articles at http://www.heise.de
> for several days.
> Firefox consumed memory until the kernel hit the red button and killed firefox
> along with some other processes like X and the windowmanager.
> 
> The behaviour of firefox worsenes if animated gifs are on Websites displayed in
> Tabs. Memory consumption grows quickly, so sometimes you run dry after only 24
> hours of usage, depending on size of system memory. 
> 
> The memory consumption of the X-server increases along with firefox and drops
> after terminating firefox. So perhaps xpixmap caches or something similar is
> involved into this issue.

a) see bug 81446 comment 81 - perhaps it still applies
b) if you are sure a) is not valid or doesn't apply in your case, then try a trunk build of firefox
c) you will want to file a bug against Firefox. This bug is for the suite.

Comment 4

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Matt Fago(bug opener), Luis B. Almeida and Moritz Kaiser, read thru Bug 320915 if memory leak is suspectable, and see Bug 320915 Comment #28.
If problem occurs even when no extention, and if problem occurs even when
bfcache is disabled, and if no error report by Leak Gauge(usable only when latest trunk), and if only Mail&News has relation to your problem, see Bug 329876.

Comment 5

[Andreas Eibach]

Could you please tell me whether the leak detector also works when checkmarking the menu items does not work? I'm unable to toggle "Dump Memory Leaks", I can only toggle the "Verbose" item.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Could you please tell me whether the leak detector also works when checkmarking
> the menu items does not work? I'm unable to toggle "Dump Memory Leaks", I can
> only toggle the "Verbose" item.

news://news.mozilla.org:119/mozilla.dev.performance may be a good place to ask.

WRT comment 2, some gif issues are being addressed on trunk so SM 2 might pick up fixes that area.

reporter is gone, and nothing reproducible here, so closing incomplete. Anyone having a problem should file a new bug, preferably after testing and verifying with trunk build.