Closed Bug 404628 Opened 17 years ago Closed 17 years ago

Memory usage intermittently balloons upward even when on blank page

Categories

(Firefox :: General, defect)

x86
Windows XP
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 404638

People

(Reporter: anowack, Unassigned)

References

()

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b1) Gecko/2007110904 Firefox/3.0b1

Firefox's memory usage will balloon upward to ~ 350,000K as reported in the Windows Task Manager, enough to slow the computer to a crawl and make Firefox unusable.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Firefox to a blank page.
2. Perform some sort of action: entering characters into the address bar seems a good trigger, but I've also seen this happen with nothing being done other than opening Firefox, going to the "Help | About menu" and leaving Firefox alone for ~1-2 minutes.  However, I've also gone several minutes with no apparent problems, but then left Firefox unattended for roughly an hour with two single-tab windows open to static pages, and returned to find this problem triggered. 
3. Observe Firefox's memory usage in Task Manager.



I have reproduced this with all extensions disabled, by simply opening Firefox and entering one character ("b") into the address bar.
This I've never seen before. Does it also occur in Safe Mode <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_Mode_(Firefox)> ?
(In reply to comment #1)
> This I've never seen before. Does it also occur in Safe Mode
> <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_Mode_(Firefox)> ?
> 

I'm uncertain.  After writing this bug, I left that Firefox alone for a while (roughly 5 minutes, I'd say) and when I got back memory usage had gone back down to normal and the problem has not reoccurred since.  So something weird and bad was happening, but it doesn't seem to be as serious as I first thought.  Therefore, I'm downgrading the severity to normal.

Just in case the information becomes , this was on a Winbook C200-series laptop: Windows XP SP2, 1.5 GHz Pentium M, 512 MB of RAM, Intel integrated graphics chip.  I'm using the same profile I used with Firefox 2.

When I install Firefox 3 on some other computers I'll see if it happens again, or if this was an odd fluke.
Severity: critical → normal
Summary: Memory usage balloons upward even when on blank page → Memory usage intermittently balloons upward even when on blank page
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 17 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
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