641847 - Firefox requires TOO MUCH CPU and RAM.Especially to restore a saved session

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[pattakosn]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.133 Safari/534.16
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110304 Firefox/3.6.15

I use multiple windows/tabs and for the last months I have noticed that Firefox "uses" too much memory and CPU. I have 4gb and a dual core 2.7GHz amd and I have seen as much as 1.5GB RAM requires. I guess that looking at the pics at the URL I give is the best way to describe it.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. kill -9 firefox while using many a tabs and windows 
2. run firefox again
Actual Results:  
There is a restore session page but firefox requires as much as 1.5 gb of RAM. When I actually click restore, RAM usage is somewhat reduced but CPU usage also sky rockets.

Expected Results:  
"reasonable" system requirements. I use chrome for the last few months with no performance problems.

I usually kill -9 firefox instead of exitting so as to restore all my tabs/windows when I next run firefox.

Comment 1

[u279076]

FYI, you can attach PNG files to bug reports.

3.png
-----
Firefox appears to be using 540MB.
Chromium appears to be using 416MB (from the processes I can see).
I think both of these are within reasonable norms.

1.png
-----
Firefox appears to be using 1GB. However, your session appears to contain another session (indicated by the Restore Session tab in your about:sessionrestore page).

Can you reproduce this without having the "session-within-a-session" and using Firefox 4.0rc1? Please test using normal exit conditions (not kill -9). Firefox 4 will always save your session.

Comment 2

[pattakosn]

As you noticed, 75% of the problem was observed while having "session-within-a-session".  The other 25% was the CPU utilization which I can not capture in any way. I tried to use time but I lost my session... That is why I always sigkill firefox.

I recovered my session by renaming sessionstore-1.js to sessionstore.js and continued.

I also installed firefox 4 beta, the latest bin release. Surprisingly it is hugely improved. Crazy RAM usage is no longer observed, and is reasonable ( I guess) , between 350MB - 800 MB while cpu is less used and overall user experience is quite smooth, while still not like chromium.

I probably should have tried firefox 4 before reporting a bug but to be honest I did not expect such a difference. Is there any way I could try to locate memory leaks or anything else using my session as a "test case scenario" ?

Comment 3

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

Given that you report that the problem appears to be solved or at least no a problem under FF4, and now FF5 is out, I would like to close out this bug as WORKSFORME or FIXED.  Any objections?  (Yes, it may still be affecting 3.6, but I don't see a patch for this being done for 3.6 - that's mostly security bugfixes now).

Comment 4

[pattakosn]

I think WORKSFORME is what it is. It still uses some hundreds of mb, but at least with the new versions it does not explode over time. Thanks.

Comment 5

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

per the reporter - WORKSFORME in FF4/FF5