379844 - Printing uses too much memory (more than 200 MB of RAM)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 377336

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Damian Yerrick]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9a5pre) Gecko/20070504 Minefield/3.0a5pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9a5pre) Gecko/20070504 Minefield/3.0a5pre

When I print any page, even Google's front page, firefox.exe uses over
200 megabytes of RAM.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Minefield and Windows Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc).
2. In Windows Task Manager, View > Select Columns and make sure
   "Memory Usage" and "Virtual Memory Size" are checked.
3. In Minefield, navigate to any page.
4. Print it.
Actual Results:  
firefox.exe uses roughly 200 MB each of Mem Usage and VM Size while preparing the document to be printed, and then spoolsv.exe uses similar amounts of RAM while printing the document.

Expected Results:  
Printing should take an order of magnitude less RAM. For instance, IE 6 SP1 prints the same page without using more than 20 MB of RAM.

My printer is a Canon S520.  I have not had a chance to install other printers or to install Minefield on other computers.

I will post a test case (a very simple page) just in case Google decides to get all fancy on us.  This test case has only HTML, no images, no script, and no Flash, yet produces the misbehavior I describe.

Marking severity as major because until I upgraded my six-year-old PC from 128 MB to 384 MB of RAM, it appeared as if firefox.exe had just hung.

Comment 1

[Damian Yerrick]

Attachment: Page with one heading and one paragraph

Is this test case minimized enough?

Comment 2

[Steffen Wilberg]

The testcase doesn't work for me, neither does http://www.google.com/, but http://www.mozilla.org/ does. And I've managed to produce a 0.97 GB spool file out of a 50 KB text file, see bug 377336 comment 12.
Anyway, this is a dupe of that bug.