666272 - Pentadactyl add-on exposes a Firefox leak

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Mario Grgic]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0

I see following in my system log when Firefox starts:

Jun 22 10:47:44 nebula [0x0-0x5c05c].org.mozilla.firefox[528]: dactyl: bootstrap: create module: @mozilla.org/commandlinehandler/general-startup;1?type=dactyl
Jun 22 10:47:44 nebula firefox-bin[528]: *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x101e197c0 of class NSCFNumber autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking

This seems to happen with the Pentadactyl extension enabled (you must use nightly builds of the extension like hg6215 found here: http://code.google.com/p/dactyl/downloads/list   since the latest release does not work with Firefox 5). 

If Pentadactyl is disabled I don't see this in the log.

Note that I have reported similar Firefox error a while back and it was fixed, but now it seems to be back in 5.0.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

Marking this "MemShrink:P3" because it only affects users of the Pentadactyl extension.

Pentadactyl is a fork of Vimperator, so I guess it's an add-on that makes modifies Firefox quite a bit.

Comment 2

[Mario Grgic]

I don't think this should be marked as Pentadactyl bug only. Most of pendadactyl is implemented in Javascript and it is not making any low level OS X specific memory allocation. So, the leak is in Firefox itself.

I have reported a similar bug a while back in Firefox 3.6 that got resolved. So this seems like a regression

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541809

Comment 3

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

Steven, Johnathan, any ideas?

Comment 4

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

This is probably a Firefox bug (not a Pentadactyl bug).  But the leaks are probably also not very significant, and not often encountered.

I'll get to it when I can ... but I won't cry if someone else beats me to it :-)

> I have reported a similar bug a while back in Firefox 3.6 that got resolved.

That bug is probably unrelated.  So this bug is probably not a regression.

Comment 5

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I just tried and failed to reproduce this bug with FF 5.0 and today's Pentadactyl nightly (pentadactyl-20110624.xpi) on OS X 10.5.8.  Later I'll try on OS X 10.6.7.

Comment 6

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> I don't think this should be marked as Pentadactyl bug only.

I've adjusted the title of the bug accordingly.  It's still a MemShrink:P3 since it only affects Pentadactyl users, and seemingly only on some versions of Mac OS X.

Comment 7

[Mario Grgic]

I tried this again with the latest nightly build (June 25, 2011) of Pentadactyl and the problem is still there:

Jun 25 09:51:50 Voyager firefox-bin[263]: *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x103004ff0 of class NSCFNumber autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking

In the meantime I have updated the OS X to 10.6.8. So it does not seem to be a problem related to OS X version.

Comment 8

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

I can't seem to reproduce this (on OS X 10.6.6), with either my current mozilla-central trunk build or Fx5.0 release version.

Do you have other add-ons installed that might somehow be interacting with Pentadactyl and leading to this?

(In any case a leak of a single NSCFNumber object is pretty insignificant, so I don't think we need to worry very much about this. But it'd be nice to understand where it comes from.)

Comment 9

[Mario Grgic]

Other extensions I have: Adblock Plus 1.3.8, Firebug 1.7.3, Look Up in Dictionary 0.3, Tab Mix Plus 0.3.8.6, Web Developer 1.1.9.

Also, my profile is pretty old and has been upgraded all the way from Firefox 2.0 (incrementally as each release or point version of Firefox became available).

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Mario, can you stil reproduce?

Comment 11

[Mario Grgic]

No, this is no longer a problem with newer versions of Firefox including current version 22.