465107 - HUGE memory leak in windows xp causes system to become almost 100% unresponsive (consumes all available ram and pagefile space)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[sergentsiler]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Build Identifier: 3.0.4

after about 2 hours of use firefox takes up all of my ram and makes the system near unresponsive. in fact most of the time the only way to avoid a total freeze is to reboot. this happens just in general use and has happened with 3.0.3 and 3.0.4

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.open ff
2.start browsing
3.wait for 2 hours and check firefoxes size in task manager if you can even acsess it at that point
Actual Results:  
firefox took up 199+ Mb of my 256 Mb of ram, also, it only stayed at about 199+ for me because it was constantly loading into my pagefile. to confirm this i checked and my pagefile use went through the roof after this happened. also, only after this happens does windows tell me that it has to increase the pagefile because it is too small, an obvious sign that something is consuming my pagefile like a wildfire

Expected Results:  
well in real life the damn memory leak shouldent exist and all of my ram and pagefile wouldnt be eaten up

i dont think this has anything to do with it but i was using the aero fox theme (cant have been that because it happens with the default theme as well)

my system specs:
CPU: mPGA 478 P4 (2.00 Ghz)
RAM: 256 Mb PC-800
System: Dell Precision Workstation 340

Comment 1

[sergentsiler]

i had a friend test a similar situation on  linux computer (ubuntu 8.10) and he got a similar result.

he had firefox open for a few hours and it took up about 227.5 of his 2048Mb of ram, after closing and reopening firefox the amount of ram used was reduced to 46 Mb and continued to increase. also, he opened multiple tabs to use some memory, then he closed them. what should have happened is that the memory usage should have gone down, and the result was that it did not. this was with firefox 3.0.3 but i have had the same result with 3.0.3 as well as 3.0.4 with identical results.

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Do you get this in the Firefox safemode ?
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

Comment 3

[sergentsiler]

yes, i got the exact same result in safe mode

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

  sergentsiler, @256MB memory running XP, your problem quite simply is thrashing due to not enough real memory.  FF using 199MB for several tabs is not unusual.
so => invalid

the linux user situation is totally different.

Comment 5

[sergentsiler]

that cannot be the case because even if i simply open firefox and leave it alone, the memory leak still exists.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

hmm, guess we'll continue the isolation route.  Please start with clean profile, and if necessary isolate to a specific URL.
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic+Troubleshooting#Further_troubleshooting_steps

You can run two firefoxes at a time if you must continue working while working the troubleshooting steps.  Start firefox as normal.  Then create a second FF *process* (using a separate profile per above) by using -no-remote
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Opening_a_new_instance_of_Firefox_with_another_profile

Comment 7

[sergentsiler]

there really is no need. i can simply tell you to open task manager, then firefox and watchas "firefox.exe" grows in size. after about 2 hours of just sitting at the firefox start page (no activity from user) it will be about 199Mb or more.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #7)
> there really is no need. 

On the contrary, don't expect everyone to see what you can see. If I were able to see it I would not have given the advice of comment 6 - but I do not, in 3.0, 3.1, nor trunk.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

post screen shot of task manager process list and list of urls as a testcase

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

sergent,
need more info to proceed. 
what URLs, "left alone", cause your issue?

Comment 11

[sergentsiler]

any url's ranging from the firefox start page to google to youtube. it is more servere when watching videos. 

interesting thing thogh, firefox 3.1 beta (beta 1 & 2) seem to not have the memory leak problem but still slow down the system after an hour or 2 of browsing or watching videos (such as youtube)

Comment 12

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Some helpful information you can provide us is found at http://quality.mozilla.org/bug-writing-guidelines. Also respond to comment 6. The link I gave has some helpful stuff for memleaks

Comment 13

[William Bumgarner [:zsinj]]

Based on comment 11, could you try a recent trunk nightly build? http://www.mozilla.org/developer/#builds

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

=> WFM based on comment 11

at this point, any further issues you would want to test with 
 http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html
started in safe mode 
 https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode
and file a new bug