392601 - After continued use Firefox and Camino on Mac OS X both stop rendering pages correctly, and then entirely

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Layout, defect)

Description

[Michael Vance]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070509 Camino/1.5
Build Identifier: Version 2007050909 (1.5)

After extended use (no clear duration or resource usage pattern) Firefox and Camino will stop rendering pages correctly, and eventually refuse to load any page elements.

This has been occurring since Firefox 1.5 at least, and still occurs on 2.x. I switched to Camino recently in frustration at this behavior hoping it wouldn't occur there but have seen the same thing happen. I also actively use Firefox on Windows and have never seen this occur, my assumption is it's particular to the way Gecko allocates underlying OS toolkit objects in Mac OS X, leading to a leak. This also affects other dialogs, such as the About Camino... dialog, which will refuse to appear after the misrendering starts. Also Firefox will often refuse to quit through the menu or Cmd-Q when this occurs, requiring a Force Quit of the application. So far that behavior has not occurred on Camino, I can always exit cleanly.

Process stats at time of first misrendering.

[foo@bar foo] ps auxwww | grep -i Camino
foo  13176  12.2  9.4   729476  98288  ??  R    Wed11PM  17:11.40 /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino -psn_0_109051905

Correct page layout.

http://michaelkvance.shackspace.com/gecko-layout-correct.tiff

Misrendered page layout.

http://michaelkvance.shackspace.com/gecko-layout-bug.tiff

After a few misrendered pages the app will then refuse to load new pages. An "open link in new tab" will cause a new tab to be created, but no address appears in the address bar, no page is loaded, etc.

I did searches for similar behavior in the db but only found bug 350331 as a possible similar issue. However resizing the window does not in any way fix this behavior I'm seeing. I also have an anecdotal report from a friend that he is seeing the same behavior on Mac OS X only.

Let me know if you need me to build or patch anything, I'm a developer myself

Thanks,

m.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load Firefox or Camino on Mac OS X
2. Browse 50-100 sites a day in tabs
3. Observer misrendered pages, eventual failure to load pages at all, etc.
Actual Results:  
Pages failed to render properly, and then load at all.

Expected Results:  
Correctly rendered pages.

Attaching build:config. This has occurred on older PPC Mac OS X machines as well as the machine I'm currently using, a Intel Mac OS X machine.

Comment 1

[Michael Vance]

Attachment: about:buildconfig

Comment 2

[Zachary Slater]

I have witnessed exactly this behavior as well.

Comment 3

[Michael Vance]

Happened again today. ps results show 4 days of uptime.

[foo@bar foo] ps auxwww | grep Camino
foo  13655  11.9 11.0   829644 114956  ??  R    Fri08AM 256:07.86 /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino -psn_0_116916225

Restart with same windows open

[foo@bar foo] ps auxwww | grep Camino
foo  15615   1.6  5.0   489932  51916  ??  S     3:50PM   0:06.80 /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino -psn_0_140378113

Comment 4

[Michael Vance]

As an additional data point it still seems to occur in Firefox 3:

http://infinite-monkeys.org/michael/misc/gecko-layout-bug-ffox3.tiff