287809 - Memory leak while viewing self-refreshing web sites in multiple tabs

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 261920

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Fu]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050323 Firefox/1.0.2 Fedora/1.0.2-1.3.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050323 Firefox/1.0.2 Fedora/1.0.2-1.3.1

By self-refreshing web sites, I mean web sites like cnn.com and espn.com. I
believe it is the automatic reloads that are being mishandled, leading to the
memory leak, more so than the tabbed browsing. I believe the tabbed browsing
just exaggerates the issue, making it easier to notice, i.e. the more tabs you
use, the quicker this becomes a problem. I can get to 8 tabs fairly quickly.

When I leave the browser running with multiple tabs open with these sites
included over a period of 4 hours or longer, my memory usage climbs over 200MB
easily. I am not including the increase in swap usage so the total memory
footprint is actually substantially larger.

I don't think memory usage escalates at this rate when self-refreshing sites are
not included in the multiple tabs. That's why this doesn't always happen with
tabbed browsing.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load various web sites (including self-refreshing sites) in multiple tabs
within one window.
2. Check memory (and swap) usage after 4 hours.
3. Close the browser and notice how much memory is freed (I used top).

Actual Results:  
When self-refreshing websites are loaded in one or more of the tabs, the memory
usage will increase dramatically (upwards of 200MB) over time (at least 4 hours).

Expected Results:  
I expect the memory usage to hover between 30 and 70 MB no matter how long the
browser is up. My usage is currently at 34MB with only one tab open as I write this.

Firefox is still a great product!

Comment 1

[José Jeria]

CAn you please retest with a trunk build?
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

Comment 2

[Fu]

(In reply to comment #1)
> CAn you please retest with a trunk build?
> http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

I'm using the build from April 1st. I will report back my observations.

Comment 3

[Ryuichi KUBUKI]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 261920 ***