281824 - (MemoryLeak) FF 1.0 Memory leak when I leave firefox up with a few sub tabs open

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Luigi]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Using firefox with subtabs, 8 subtabs for instance, after a while I notice that
firefox process is consuming about 150 Mb of Ram! I guess this might be a memory
leak. This happens any time I leave Firefox open for longer than 24h. I'm
running on Dell laptop 8600, WinXP SP2, 1G.Ram .  Let me know if you need more info.
Hope it helps!



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.open firefox
2. open 8+ subtabs
3. leave it open for 24h
4. check firefox process used memory in Task Manager

Actual Results:  
Firefox is extremely slow, almost hangs.

Expected Results:  
No memory leak, no hangs.

Comment 1

[Luigi]

Attachment: Image of memory leak by Firefox 1.0

Firefox 1.0

Comment 2

[Ajmer Phull]

OS: W2K v5.00.2195 SP4 
Chip:Intel P3 750MHz
RAM: 512Mb

Viewing Gallery sites (web sites that display images) causes VM to grow, which
is expected, but when the page or tab is closed, the VM is not free'd. Even
closing the browser does not free the VM, until every FF browser is closed.

This is a problem, since i have to close all browsers once every 24hours.

This is my normal session of browsers and you can try these to reproduce the
problem:

Note the VM level.
1. Open DWMX (v7.0.1), Fireworks (v7.0.2), a few Windows Explorers

Note the VM level.
2. start 1 ff browser and open a few tabs to normal sites, such as yahoo mail,
google and other stuff i need for access - usually about 4 or 5 tabs.

Note the VM level.
3. start another ff browser and open a few tabs to forum sites and other
reference sites - usually about 4 to 5 sites.

Note the VM level.
4. start another ff browser, which i use for searching when i am working, like
php.net, dev.mysql.com, google, etc, so this can grow from 1 to about 10 to 15 tabs.

Note the VM level.
5. start another ff browser and using Flash Got (see note below to install Flash
Got) i may build a gallery to search for images to use in forums, for example.
Try this in Build Gallery http://www.itv-f1.com/ImageLibrary/3[1000-2000;1]_2.jpg

Flash Got - installed from http://www.flashgot.net/getit

You will notice the VM grow, but when you close the tab, the VM is not released,
nor when the 4th ff browser is close. Only when you close all of them does the
VM drop.

Comment 3

[HopeSeekr of xMule]

I *have* to leave my stats :-))

System uptime: 15 days
FireFox windows open: 8
FireFox tabs open: 11 + 1 + 1 + 15 + 9 + 1 + 2 + 20 = 60


Image Name Mem Usage VM Size
firefox.exe 307672 K 589944 K

Physical: 2096492 K
Available: 1065556 K
Disk Cache: 1323716 K

Now you see why 1 GB just isn't enough for me :-/

Closing all FireFox tabs but this one, gmail, and aventuremail...


firefox.exe 324680 K 568328 K

It boggles my mind ... not only did it not free any RAM, but now the system
thinks previously-cached old RAM is now to be uncached :-/

That this bug is marked as "unconfirmed" *boggles* my mind even more :-((

Comment 4

[sfbatuta]

I am running into the same problem mentioned. It does not really take 24hr for
problem to appear. During the course of a work day and while visiting internal
websites that are mainly text and pdf based, the browser memory consumption on
W2K system can grow up to 240MB. Closing all open browsers and tabs but the
simplest page does not release the memory properly. All firefox windows have to
be closed before memory is freed. Can somebody screen this bug and verify it?

Comment 5

[Kyle George]

Attachment: Screenshot of taskmanager and firefox when consuming 263 MB of virtual memory

Using:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225
Firefox/1.0.1

Always reproducable.

Does not take more than 24 hours to appear.  Can appear with frequent heavy use
in a very short period of time.  By heavy use I mean a lot of tabs openned and
closed.  In this particular instance, firefox was consuming 263 MB of virtual
memory.

OS: Windows 2000 SP4
Processor: Pentium III 866
Physical memory: 1 GB

See attachment.

Comment 6

[Luis B. Almeida]

This is a general Mozilla problem, not just a problem of Firefox.

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 7

[Michel Cheval]

Actually, it "works" even with one tab opened. For example, there is an url
which was saved onto the harddrive. Then once opened it makes a leak. Here is
the url:
http://www.paroles.net/chansons/20240.htm

Comment 8

[David]

Attachment: Image of firefox using insane amounts of memory

This is after maybe two hours of browsing around with the brand-new Firefox 1.5.  Notice how there is only one window open, no tabs, not even a page loaded.  Extensions used: Adblock 0.5.2.039, BetterSearch 1.9, BugMeNot 0.8, CustomizeGoogle 0.38, Diable Targets for Downloads 1.0, DOM Inspector 1.8, Gmail Notifier 0.5.3 (not logged in, as you can see), OpenBook 1.3.4, Talkback 1.5, TargetAlert 0.8.9.5.  Theme is Whitehart 0.1.4 Deer Park enabled build from http://www.bytecave.net/anders/theme/#Whitehart

For the love of god, fix this memory leak before you worry about **** like the saturation of the color in the location bar when you visit a secure site.

Comment 9

[David]

I'll add some more details:

Windows XP SP2
1GB physical RAM

The relevant numbers of the screenshot, if you're using Lynx or something:
Firefox "Mem usage": 601MB
Firefox "VM Size": 713MB

I'm not sure if Mem usage and VM Size are mutually exclusive, or if there is some overlap.  However, I've seen close to 1GB used in VM Size before, which is positively insane no matter how you slice it.  This single issue has me considering switching to Opera.

Comment 10

[Jo Hermans]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Created an attachment (id=204547) [edit]
> Image of firefox using insane amounts of memory
> 
> This is after maybe two hours of browsing around with the brand-new Firefox
> 1.5.  Notice how there is only one window open, no tabs, not even a page
> loaded.  Extensions used: Adblock 0.5.2.039, BetterSearch 1.9, BugMeNot 0.8,
> CustomizeGoogle 0.38, Diable Targets for Downloads 1.0, DOM Inspector 1.8,
> Gmail Notifier 0.5.3 (not logged in, as you can see), OpenBook 1.3.4, Talkback
> 1.5, TargetAlert 0.8.9.5.  Theme is Whitehart 0.1.4 Deer Park enabled build
> from http://www.bytecave.net/anders/theme/#Whitehart
> 
> For the love of god, fix this memory leak before you worry about crap like the
> saturation of the color in the location bar when you visit a secure site.
> 

Don't use this version of Adblock - it leaks memory like crazy. Adblock Plus is a lot better (currenlty at least).

Comment 11

[Aidan]

I'm having this exact same problem with firefox, you simpily cannot blame extentions for a 700Mb+ memory leak, this is clearly an issue with the Gecko engine.. The boys and girls at development need to pin this issue as their first priority, I've seen people question the saftey of Firefox based on memory leaks, afterall, a dodgy memory system is clearly an exploit magnet.

Comment 12

[Steve Chapel]

(In reply to comment #0)
> 1.open firefox
> 2. open 8+ subtabs
> 3. leave it open for 24h
> 4. check firefox process used memory in Task Manager

So you simply start Firefox, do nothing but open 8 or more tabs, and leave it for 24 hours, and when you come back lots of memory is used up by the Firefox process? What pages do you have open in the tabs?

Comment 13

[Steve Chapel]

I've had Firefox 1.5.0.1 on Windows XP SP 2 open with 11 tabs (the Firefox start page, and the top 10 Alexa English language sites) for 26 hours. Mem Usage is stable at 43 MB and VM Size is stable at 35 MB. It seems as responsive as ever. Does anyone have insights as to how to reproduce this problem?

Comment 14

[Steve Chapel]

The original reporter contacted me by email and let me know that it didn't matter what pages were open in the tabs, and he no longer uses Firefox. I'm closing this as WFM.

Note that this does *not* mean that I'm denying that Firefox has memory leaks, but that *this specific bug* is not reproducible in a current build of Firefox. If anyone has steps that can reproduce a memory leak, by all means write a good memory leak bug report as per http://dbaron.org/log/2006-01#e20060110a