432419 - Large Memory Leak when restoring from large session

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Session Restore, enhancement)

Description

[henryfhchan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Safari/525.17
Build Identifier: 

A large memory leak happens and causes my system run like a snail when restoring a 30 tabbed, (two pages with embedded flash).  The memory used by Minefield rises up to a higher level than before I terminated the Minefield application from the processes tab in task manager.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open many tabs, especially ones with flash and windows media player.
2. Kill the process
3. Restore the session
Actual Results:  
System slow, sometimes crash.


I think firefox should improve the session restore by "Warning Users" when the session store is very large.
It should provide an option to Continue or Purge all back and forward history and all input and all cookies saved in the session restore file and restore only the pages opened (Full Reload).

--

This is Critical or Trivial.  (It seems hard for me to choose which one is more appropriate).
It causes the software to crash and hang, but not lose data.  I provided a suggestion and a nice workaround that firefox should do.  Which one is it?

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan]

What version of Firefox? Type about: in the address bar, copy and paste the Build identifier line in this bug.

Comment 2

[Kai Liu]

Doesn't sound much like a problem with session restore per se, but a problem with a page that's causing high CPU/memory usage.  I suspect that the page(s) in question would cause this problem regardless of whether they were opened manually or restored as a part of a session.  Perhaps you are looking for a solution like bug 407117?

Comment 3

[henryfhchan]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9pre) Gecko/2008050105 Minefield/3.0pre

A solution like bug 407117 might be good.  I was thinking of a button that when you click it, it functions like restoring a set of bookmarks (with no history, cookies or input or whatsoever).

It might be a problem with the plug-ins.  It seems to happen when I have lots of multimedia -- embedded flash or embedded wmv (using object tag, not embed tag, but you can't say objected, it's got another meaning.)

Comment 4

[henryfhchan]

There are also I/O Read and Writes detected by Process Explorer when Minefield is idle and RAM usage and Commit Charge increases.

Comment 5

[Simon Bünzli]

There are no indications of an actual memory leak in this bug report. Plug-ins are known to be potentially resource intensive and Session Restore is also known to perform suboptimally when handling large amounts of tabs and windows (see bug 394492). Closing this bug as INVALID as it's not quite clear which of these two is the actual issue (and thus where to dupe to).

As for your suggestions for how to handle this, that's indeed bug 407117.