635620 - Firefox never frees memory when leaving a website. After a few websites starts to hang.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 659855

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Alfonso Murolo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b11) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b11) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b11

Visiting some websites NOT at the same time (this means in the same tab you change websites consecutively) firefox loads them in RAM and, when you leave them, it never frees it.
Consequences are after viewing 4 web pages, RAM may go up to 250MB used by firefox in ONE SINGLE TAB. 
After reaching 550MB used, it stars freeing RAM to 450MB used. Then it grows again.
Even if I have 4GB RAM, Firefox stars then to hang after 5-10 minutes.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start firefox
2. Open a website in the only TAB opened.
3. Edit the URL to open another website.
4. Edit the URL to open another website again.
5. Edit the URL to open another website again.
6. Check memory usage.
Actual Results:  
My RAM usage went to 200MB.

Expected Results:  
Probably it should have saved some RAM? :/

tested with websites:
http://www.youtube.com
http://www.repubblica.it
http://www.corriere.it
http://www.google.com

Comment 1

[Alfonso Murolo]

Oh i forgot. Following the same steps in IE i got 50MB memory usage at maximum.

Comment 2

[Alfonso Murolo]

Another test (more dramatic):
http://www.youtube.com
http://www.repubblica.it
http://www.corriere.it
http://www.facebook.com (as logged in)

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Please try http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode.
It's by design that not all RAM is returned after you leave a page after a cold start (memory cache, bfcache...).

Comment 4

[Alfonso Murolo]

Ok, this makes firefox more stable. RAM usage is under 120MB. 
Safe mode disables extensions and uses default configs.
Given that i didn't edit my configs in any way, is this a bug with the plugin manager or some plugins inside? (I do not have such strange plugins: adobe reader, office plugins for reading documents, flash, java..)

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Plugins are not disabled but extensions are and the JS JIT and the hardware acceleration. Now disable all extensions under tools/addons/extensions and try it again.

Comment 6

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Also, try to update your graphics driver in case it is something with hardware acceleration.

Comment 7

[Alfonso Murolo]

Updated the driver, still stable.
I got the bug again re-enabling Firebug. Seems to be related to extensions then (or to that extension in particular.. is it possible that an extension may send memory garbage collector to hell?)

Comment 8

[orangezilla]

Isn't this a likely duplicate of Bug 631733 that has been fixed in latest nightlies? Note that safe mode disables jaegermonkey javascript so does not necessarily implicate addons.

Comment 9

[Alfonso Murolo]

But with javascript enabled i didn't get any of this memory leaks.
Re-enabling firebug got this back again.

Comment 10

[Danial Horton]

(In reply to comment #7)
> Updated the driver, still stable.
> I got the bug again re-enabling Firebug. Seems to be related to extensions then
> (or to that extension in particular.. is it possible that an extension may send
> memory garbage collector to hell?)

that is always a possibility.

Firebug, cooliris/piclens, microsoft html5 video extension, and some others all cause a fresh profile to excessively consume memory.

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

so it's probably one of these https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced;resolution=---;short_desc_type=allwordssubstr;product=Core;product=Firefox;short_desc=firebug

Comment 12

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

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

Also, 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.