423164 - firefox allocate a lot of memory when closing a tab with this url/freeze for a while

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 422676

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[Matp75]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.9b4) Gecko/2008030714 Firefox/3.0b4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.9b4) Gecko/2008030714 Firefox/3.0b4

watch memory used by firefox 
go to http://digg.com/settolerance?csorttype=c-all&return=/tech_news/Digg_This:_09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0&storyid=1901261
wait for url to load
close tab
What occurs :
Firefox allocate several hundreds of memory and is stalled for about 1 minute, then free up the memory and close the tab at the same time.  
Expected :
Tab is closed immediately, memory goes down, firefox not stalled...

I found somebody having this problem there http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/#comment-3025
I open this bug as I didn't find a open bug which looks like this.
I'm using Firefox 3.0b4 on XP + a bunch of extensions (adblock+, tmp, ...)
I don't use session restore.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Matp75]

Some more tests :
With my normal profile, I disabled all extensions.
Still the same :
I just load Firefox, goes to this url (I don't scroll at all)
The url loads between 15 and 30s. I can see some activity after the page says to have finished loading but nothing after 30s
The url seems to allocate about 50M. When closing the tab, I have seen firefox allocate 300M

With a new profile, results are somehow different :
the url never finished to load (I've been waiting several minutes ...)
When closing the tab (I have to close it befor it loads completely), I see some more allocation but as it is less than on my normal profile, it is less perceptible. This may be because the url has not finished to load

note : with my normal profile, I'm logged on digg. With a new profile, I'm new to digg.

Comment 2

[Matp75]

Similar behaviour with latest nighty (3.0b5pre, 20080315) except page load never finish with my standard profile (like for a new profile)
Also globally, firefox with my standard profile allocate more memory at start (without extension) than with a new profile (about 20/30M) 

Comment 3

[David Weitz]

I can confirm this. I got to about 185MB and I had to Ctrl-Alt-Delete and close the process down. I believe this is because Digg loads all the comments via js and when there are a lot of comments, it just bogs now. Is there a way to time out the script sooner if it's getting timed out?

Comment 4

[mmortal03]

Confirmed, also even in safe mode, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9pre) Gecko/2008032811 Minefield/3.0pre

Just for reference, people might argue this is a page design problem, so I tested it in IE.  With IE, it also causes a slight non-normal pause when closing the tab, however, the huge memory spike does not occur.