354929 - Firefox leaks a lot of memory in Linux, e.g. after closing a tab - memory doesn't get released

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 130157

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060326 Firefox/1.5.0.3 (Debian-1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.3-2)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20060927 Firefox/2.0

Start Firefox in the morning visit many sites by opening and closing new tabs with them. Then in the evening when you leave only one *empty* tab open, Firefox RSS value can reach 1-2GB (this can be seen via top output).

In the process of working FF allocates and releases tiny amounts of memory which causes memory fragmentation. Linux glibc library often cannot free the memory allocated this way. There's one guy in Russia who ported OpenBSD memory allocation library to workaround this issue, unfortunately FF sometimes hangs up when being run with it. You can find the sources of this library here http://mr.himki.net/OpenBSD_malloc_Linux.c.

To prove my words here's the discussion (in Russian) of this bug here http://www.linux.org.ru/view-message.jsp?msgid=1452045 and here http://www.linux.org.ru/view-message.jsp?msgid=1369016

This bug also affects *Linux* version of SeaMonkey and it's *not* the same as PR324081.

(It's not a severe bug, of course. Especially if you have more than two GB of the physical RAM or frequently restart Firefox.)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Details say it all
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This bug often makes Firefox crash (via Linux kernel OOM killer) or slows down your PC a lot if you don't have enough virtual memory, so I believe this bug severity is critical.

Comment 1

[O.V.Zenin]

> This bug also affects *Linux* version of SeaMonkey 

Therefore, can the product field be changed to "core" as this bug affects Firefox, Mozilla Suite, Seamonkey, etc.?

Comment 2

[Steve Chapel]

CC'ing Boris Zbarsky because I hear that he understands Russian.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

This is basically bug 130157.  Both the bug description and the linked-to forum threads (which are well-summarized in the job description) match what shaver and I ran into in that bug.

I'll put further comments in that bug.


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 130157 ***