268248 - sleeping wrappers waste memory

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Jérôme Bouat]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1

When we look at the process list:
----------
  VSZ   RSS  COMMAND
 2392  1256  \_ /bin/sh /usr/local/bin/firefox
 2940  1532  |   \_ /bin/sh /usr/local/firefox/run-mozilla.sh
72748 26524  |       \_ /usr/local/firefox/firefox-bin
----------
we see that wrappers which are sleeping waste memory.

Why wrappers do not terminate after launching their subprocess ?

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Because they want to execute some code after the program finished ?

<http://lxr.mozilla.org/aviarybranch/source/build/unix/run-mozilla.sh#196>

In this case, it's some code that tells you there's a core-file that was
generated, and then offers to run a debugger.

You can debate if this necessary for end-users. If absolutely nothing has to be
run after the application, we can always use 'exec', so we won't fork the shell
while launching the applciation. But I don't see this a huge waste, it's pretty
common to see these on Unix and Unix-like systems. Compared to the rest of your
OS, a 1.5MB resident set isn't large at all.

Comment 2

[Jérôme Bouat]

I mean you need only 1 shell instance in order to catch exceptions. Only
"run-mozilla.sh" seems to handle such exceptions. "firefox" only join running
instances, manage configurat, etc and thus don't need to still running.

Comment 3

[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 4

[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.

Comment 5

[skierpage]

This bug was fixed in Firefox 3.6 or 3.7 development.  The firefox shell script exec's run-mozilla-sh which exec's firefox-bin, so it stays one process.  I think there's a later bug for it.