278523 - Downloads work very well the first time, but then get progressively worse and worse

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[Prof. Walter Wolf]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

When downloading attachments or documents the first download after I have opened
Firefox works excellently, but then it gets progressively worse until the system
gets stuck and I have to use Force Quit to close Firefox. When I reopen Firefox
that same document will now download in a snap! That has been happening for some
time.
I wish to add that I am delighted with the Firefox/Thunderbird system. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Download a document (e.g., an article from a scientific journal)
2.Download a second document
3.etc, etc

Actual Results:  
As discussed above, downloads deteriorate, require more and more time, until the
system gets stuck and I have to use Force Quit. Then, on relaunching Firefox, no
problem until several download attempts later - all different articles or
attachments. 

Expected Results:  
Downloads should be equally efficient every time.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

I don't have any theory for why one session worth of entries would slow things
down (unless a session involves hundreds or thousands of downloads), but: what
do you have for Preferences/Privacy/Download Manager History's "Remove files
from..."? If it's "When Firefox Exits" (which seems likely, if exiting cures the
problem), could you try for a while with it set to "Upon Successful Download" to
see if getting the entries out of the history works around the problem? (And
also to see if it does realize that it has successfully completed the downloads,
which would be a problem if it doesn't.)

Comment 2

[Giampiero Torielli]

When firefox progressively gets slow download after download, I've seen on 'top'
monitor that firefox used memory growth to over 300 Mb and the entire system
suffer the low free memory.
May be that there is a big memory leak on firebird code?

(problem seen on Linux version. I didn't test on windows version)

Comment 3

[Prof. Walter Wolf]

(In reply to comment #2)
> When firefox progressively gets slow download after download, I've seen on 'top'
> monitor that firefox used memory growth to over 300 Mb and the entire system
> suffer the low free memory.
> May be that there is a big memory leak on firebird code?
> 
> (problem seen on Linux version. I didn't test on windows version)
> 

It would appear that the same problem may be occuring on Mac. Now that I do not have to close Firefox 
so often, I have run into the "out of memory" problem. 

Comment 4

[Prof. Walter Wolf]

I continue having these problems. At the beginning Firefox works well, but as I continue subsequent 
downloads it becomes progressively worse. So much so that I have now resorted to use Safari for 
downloads, and that works like a charm. Pleas advise what further changes/corrections I should try, 
other than what you advised, or whether these are problems you expect to correct in the next version 
of Firefox. 

Comment 5

[Alan Eliasen]

I see this bug too on Windows.  The download window takes about 20 seconds to
open up, and memory usage grows hugely whenever downloading any file in Firefox.

Platform and OS should be changed to "All" as it's been reported here on Linux,
Mac, and Windows.

Comment 6

[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:
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Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 7

[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 8

[peter]

I have observed behavior in FF 1.5.0.2 under win2K-sp4 that seems to be the same bug.

More exactly, when there are numerous old downloads (say >50) in the download history, starting to download a file brings all firefox activity to a halt for something like 20 secs (1.7GHz dual Xeon machine), with firefox using 100% of 1 processor, until the download is nearly complete.

Clearing the download history completely cures this problem (using "clean up" in the downloads window).

I have not gone through another 50 downloads to check it, but it may be useful to know that the download history contained one stray download that had never completed.

Note that I have autoclearing of the download history turned off.

Since this totally kills performance, I suggest that either the bug be fixed, or the option to only remove download history manually be changed so that no more than some reasonable amount of history be kept that will not destroy performance.  (Of course, that's assuming that I'm right in guessing the cause.)