67377 - Incredible memory usage; multiple mozilla-bin processes

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[kyle]

I downloaded netscape 6 and had this problem.  I then downloaded the mozilla 0.7
binary and found the same problem.  I am now running M18 off of CVS from
2001-01-31.  I built it with GCC 2.95.2 and glibc 2.1.3.

First, my mozilla source tree is about 1.5 GB compiled.  Is this normal?  It
seems excessive.

My actual problem:  when I spawn mozilla, I get four instances of the
mozilla-bin process, each of which malloc's an insane amount of memory.  And
while it appears only one of the processes actually uses any CPU, they all take
up the same huge amount of memory.  If I watch top while mozilla starts, the mem
usage jumps from a few megs to at least 30 or 40 quite quickly, and then it
seems to gradually increase as I use the browser.  Here is the output from ps
-auxw right now (as I am using my current build to post this report):

USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root      6940  0.0  0.0   832    0 pts/0    SW   20:20   0:00      \_ /bin/sh
/usr/src/mozilla/dist/bin/run-mozilla.sh ./mozilla-bin
root      6945 18.0 66.5 64148 41368 pts/0   S    20:20   7:46          \_
./mozilla-bin
root      6957  0.0 66.5 64148 41368 pts/0   S    20:23   0:00              \_
./mozilla-bin
root      6958  0.0 66.5 64148 41368 pts/0   S    20:23   0:00                 
\_ ./mozilla-bin
root      7035  0.0 66.5 64148 41368 pts/0   S    20:44   0:00                 
\_ ./mozilla-bin

gtop reports about 140 meg resident size for the 4 mozilla-bin processes. 
Obviously this makes my Pentium II with 64 meg of ram run quite slowly.

Tell me that mozilla isn't really this elephantine.

Kyle
<[e-mail]>

Comment 1

[timeless]

linux ps is stupid :-) what you are seeing is the 4 threads mozilla uses, they 
share memory allocation, so if anything that's a bug in ps.  yes mozilla takes 
1.5-2gb to build.

Comment 2

[kyle]

Ok, wasn't aware that these were threads.  So 64 megs for the whole process is
normal?  Also, the layout seems to go very slowly.  For example, it takes about
10 seconds to layout the bugzilla query page.  Do I have to buy a new computer
to use mozilla?

Comment 3

[timeless]

did you --disable-debug --enable-optimize? yes 64 mb isn't unusual, and yes 
we're working to improve performance and footprint.

Comment 4

[Doron Rosenberg (IBM)]

64? that is a bit much, mine usually is around 30 (linux, cvs building).

You are probably building debug, that takes more memory I believe. You should
follow timeless's advice, and ./configure --disable-debug --enable-optimize (be
sure to make -distclean before to get rid of the old makefiles and such) .

You can also --disable-tests, that saves a bit of space as well