263588 - Refuses to load links/new pages after having many windows/tabs open, address bar stops responding.

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[seanmchale]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1

Difficult to reproduce in exact steps, but in general, I usually have 5-12
actual FireFox windows open at any time, with a varying number of tabs within
each going.  After awhile (~2-5 days continuously open, browsing about 3 hrs a
day), I'll click on a link or attempt to open a new web page and Firefox will
hang... alt-tabbing to a new application, then returning to Firefox will bring
*some* partial functionality (able to go between the tabs, able to scroll, able
to close tabs, but that's it).  At that point, the swirling "Loading" icon on
the tab is there but does not move. Clicking on tabs is slowed down
substantially, and clicking on the tab which initially froze everything produces
a gray screen, eventually causing Windows to call Firefox "Not Responding". 

During this time, the address bar takes the address of one of the tabs in the
window, but fails to update/change as I click on other tabs.  Right-click menus
are very slow to load (10 seconds - sometimes never) and are unresponsive, as is
every function in Firefox which would create a new window/dialog box.  Closing
tabs at this point works...but fails to free up RAM occupied by Firefox.  Once
all of the windows have been manually closed, Firefox.exe still remains resident
in memory, still holding onto all of the RAM it was prior to the crash.  For
some reason, Firefox seems to consume ~123MB of RAM during this, page file'd
portion being about double that.   The only "remedy" at this point is to open up
Task Manager, End Task on Firefox.exe, then start over...  very annoying when
you're in the middle of a few research projects and have things grouped by window.  

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
See Details
Actual Results:  
See Details

Expected Results:  
Should work!  0.8 worked fine!

Comment 1

[Dan M]

Oy! Sounds awful. But, Oy! Takes two to five days to reproduce, eh? Is 123MB a
lot on your system? (Could the performance hit be blamed entirely on disk swapping?)

Comment 2

[seanmchale]

512MB installed on the computer, so no, it shouldn't be a major load.  Happens
whether I have a ton of programs running in the background or just Firefox.

Comment 3

[seanmchale]

I forgot to mention that it happens with my laptop as well (192MB installed)...
both were running the latest version of AdBlock... removed AdBlock from this
system, cleared all of the privacy settings, and will continue testing on here.
Not sure if this will "fix" the problem or not, but it gives me something to try. 

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.