326659 - when browse tab is closed, memory not released. memory leak is big!

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[darko radosavljevic]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060124 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060124 Firefox/1.5.0.1

each new tab open and web page loaded, firefox allocate memory, but when tab is closed memory usege is not less.
i tryed with www.blic.co.yu page.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060209 Firefox/1.6a1 ID:2006020920
Could not reproduce with the Leak Gauge:
Leaked 0 out of 21 DOM Windows
Leaked 0 out of 39 documents
Leaked 0 out of 8 docshells

Comment 2

[darko radosavljevic]

    platform: 

    SuSE Linux 9.2 (i586)
    Linux version 2.6.8-24-default (geeko@buildhost) (gcc version 3.3.4 (pre 3.3.5 20040809)) #1 Wed Oct 6 09:16:23 UTC 2004

    firefox:
    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060124 Firefox/1.5.0.1

Comment 3

[Philip Withnall (unavailable)]

I think you're getting confused about http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009749.html. If you can prove that Firefox is actually leaking memory (not just caching pages), by all means re-open this bug report.

Comment 4

[O.V.Zenin]

Certainly, there's no such a confusion:

I have ** browser.cache.memory.enable = false ** and the virual memory size of the firefox-bin process never decreases after closing tabs/windows.

(firefox 1.0.8: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060303 Firefox/1.0.81.0.8/linux ;  linux kernel 2.4.*, 2.6.*)

This behaviour is always reproduced with the following steps:

0. Set browser.cache.memory.enable to 'false' . 
1. Restart firefox with the about:blank page. Note the firefox-bin's VM size. 
2. Open multiple tabs/windows (e.g. with Bookmarks->Bookmarks Toolbar Folder->Latest Headlines->Open in Tabs). Note the firefox-bin's virual memory size.
4. Close all the tabs and windows except arbitrarily chosen one tab.
5. In the remaining tab open about:blank. Note the VM size again. It always remains at the level of step '2' and never goes back to the size noticed at step '1'.

An example:

At step '1' ps vp `pidof firefox-bin` gives:

PID   TTY      STAT   TIME  MAJFL   TRS   DRS   RSS %MEM COMMAND
31863 pts/0    S      0:01   3593  9185 37822 22128  2.1 firefox-bin

At step '2' we get:

PID   TTY      STAT   TIME  MAJFL   TRS   DRS   RSS %MEM COMMAND
31863 pts/0    S      0:14   3841  9185 66886 51164  4.9 firefox-bin

After closing all the tabs and opening the about:blank in the remaining one we have:

PID   TTY      STAT   TIME  MAJFL   TRS   DRS   RSS %MEM COMMAND
31863 pts/0    S      0:17   3865  9185 64794 51188  4.9 firefox-bin

This VM size ~50M _never_ goes down to the initial value of ~22M.

On Linux, I observed exactly the same behaviour with "browser.cache.memory.enable = false" for FF 1.0.*, FF 1.5, and SeaMonkey 1.5a [Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060309 SeaMonkey/1.5a]

On a machine with, e.g. 64M RAM + 256M swap, it makes Firefox practically unusable after several hours of browsing, the system gets into permanent swapping and the only way is to restart Firefox, closing all the tabs never helps.

NB: This problem ** can't be reproduced on Windows 2000 ** with FF 1.0.*, the virtual memory size always goes down there to a roughly initial value ~20M after closing tabs. 

It is likely to be a Linux  specific problem.

Comment 5

[karl.stein.pro]

This bug is still present in the version 65.
I could noticed it using the about:performance tab.
After working on a memory conuming single page application, the memory grew up from 25MB to +300MB and neither closing or refreshing the tab released the memory.