634449 - Latest minefield builds have severe memory leaks or extremely high memory usage

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 659855

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Michael]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b12pre) Gecko/20110215 Firefox/4.0b12pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b12pre) Gecko/20110215 Firefox/4.0b12pre

I've been seeing memory usage of about 450 MB on restart of the latest two builds of Minefield, with 20 tabs open, and > 1 GB after the browser has been running for about 6-8 hours.  Note that I still see nearly the same memory usage if I restart the browser in private browsing mode (in order to restart it with only one empty tab open).  Note that this is real memory usage, not virtual memory usage.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Run latest Minefield build
2.  Memory usage is around 400-500 MB
3.  Wait
4.  RAM usage exceeds 1 GB.
Actual Results:  
RAM usage is in the .5 - 1 GB range

Expected Results:  
RAM usage is in the 20-100 MB range

Comment 1

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

what does about:memory give you?
Is this a fresh profile?

Comment 2

[JR Conlin [:jrconlin,:jconlin]]

Received the following complaint:
"==
I was talking about working set memory on Twitter. Firefox 4 is using 774MB
tonight, with no more heavy use than I put Firefox 3 under and never saw this
kind of usage after half a day.

http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/9395/ff4memory.png

That's after running since 8am, with no more than 5 tabs running at a time.
Mostly from Newsvine.com (regular posting and interaction), Gmail (as an "app"
tab), and a few other transient tabs (HuffPost, NYTimes, Google News, etc).

If you'd like more detailed information, let me know what you need and I'll get
it.

=="
User is Paul Tenny
[e-mail]

Some additional info regarding his platform:

"==
OS: Windows XP, Service Pack 2.

Extensions enabled:
  Adblock Plus 1.3.3
  Greasemonkey 0.9.1
  Java Quick Starter 1.0
  Mozilla Archive FOrmat 1.0b3.0
  Pearl Crescent Page Saver Basic 2.6.1
  Sothink Web Video Downloader for Firefox 6.1
  YSlow 2.1.0

Extensions disabled (some because they aren't compatible with Firefox 4, some
because I don't use them):
  bit.ly preview 1.272
  Digg Toolbar for Firefox 2.0.2
  Firebug 1.6.2
  Google Desktop Indexer 5.9.0911
  OneClick YouTube Downloader 1.0.4
  RECAP 0.8.1
  SearchStatus 1.36
  TVU Web Player 2,5,3,1

Plugins:
  Adobe Acrobat 9.4.2.220
  Google Earth Plugin 1.0.0.1
  Google Talk Plugin 1.7.1.0
  Google Talk Plugin Video Accelerator 0.1.43.4
  Google Update 1.2.183.39
  Hulu Desktop 0.9.14.1
  Java Deployment Toolkit 6.0.210.7
  Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U21 6.0.210.7
  Microsoft(R) DRM 9.0.0.3250 ("DRM Store Netscape Plugin", and "DRM Netscape
Network Object")
  Octoshape Streaming Services 20000.9.928.0
  Shockwave Flash 10.2.152.32
  Silverlight Plug-In 4.0.50917.0
  TVU Web Player for Firefox 2.5.3.1
  Veetle TV Core 0.9.18.0
  Veetle TV Player 0.9.18.0
  Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Link Library 3.0.2.629

The current profile is not new, it was created when I built this machine on
2009-06-26. Whatever the latest version of Firefox 3 was on that date, that's
the version that created this profile.

Here's the output of about:memory:

Overview

Memory mapped:
488,636,416

Memory in use:
364,301,300

Other Information

Description    Value

malloc/allocated 364,305,148
malloc/mapped 488,636,416
malloc/committed 425,103,360
malloc/dirty 1,499,136
win32/privatebytes 460,718,080
win32/workingset 472,268,800
js/gc-heap 126,877,696
js/string-data 7,026,362
js/mjit-code 9,228,952
storage/sqlite/pagecache 32,058,912
storage/sqlite/other 1,667,864
gfx/d2d/surfacecache 0
gfx/d2d/surfacevram 0
gfx/surface/win 322,091,269
images/chrome/used/raw 0
images/chrome/used/uncompressed 533,711
images/chrome/unused/raw 0
images/chrome/unused/uncompressed 0
images/content/used/raw 5,457,727
images/content/used/uncompressed 712,946
images/content/unused/raw 11,399
images/content/unused/uncompressed 20,176
layout/al l8,023,281
layout/bidi0gfx/surface/image 5,904
shmem/allocated 1,413,120
shmem/mapped 1,413,120
content/canvas/2d_pixel_bytes 876,060

It's lower than the 700MB+ that it was a few hours ago because I restarted the
browser, but it's only been running three hours.

If you'd like me to disable any or all of those extensions and see what
happens, I'd be happy to. Just let me know.
=="

Comment 3

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

Michael, a number of leaks have been fixed recently (see bug 632234).  Can you redo your measurements with Firefox 4 RC 1?

Comment 4

[Carlos Rodríguez]

I also have problems with FF4.0 and Mac OSX 10.6

Comment 5

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

This report does not have enough details to be acted upon usefully.  I'm marking it as a duplicate of bug 659855, which is the tracking bug for all memory leaks in Firefox 4 betas.

Comment 6

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

I should add: Firefox 5 has better memory behaviour than Firefox 4 (http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/05/25/firefox-5-has-fewer-leaks-than-firefox-4/).  You can get a beta version of Firefox 5 from http://beta.mozilla.org.