70821 - Limit memory usage per window

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

Mozilla can just suck up memory. Especially when you come to pages that take a 
lot of memory to render. Some pages, like recursive frames can suck up megs and 
megs of memory. Mozilla needs to keep track of how much memory different parts 
can use, and shut off the valve if the mem starts to become a large percentage 
of the computer's memory. Possibly, people could even set how much mem is the 
max it can use.

Comment 1

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

I got positive feedback from Jesse and he asked me to add him.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 30942, Browser should remain responsive during most infinite loops.

Comment 3

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

See also bug 8065 where Mozilla should shut off a web page after it has sucked 
up too much mem.

Comment 4

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

Changed it to per window because browser windows aren't the only thing we want 
to limit memory usage on.

Comment 5

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

> Changed it to per window because browser windows aren't the only thing we want 
> to limit memory usage on.

Not sure about that one. Mailnews can (currently) suck up large amounts of mem.
You'd have to allow 70+ MB for the Mailnews 3pane window, but 70MB are way too
much for a browser window.
I suggest to limit mem useage for foreign content, e.g. per <browser> section.

Comment 6

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

What is the 3pane window? If it uses 70+MB, then that is way too much and that 
needs to be fixed in a seperate bug. Limiting mem usage might mean that certain 
things will need to be adjusted or won't work such as that 3pane window. Maybe 
there can be a list of exceptions for the memory limiting code until they are 
fixed.

If the window is, say 70MB because it has 70MB of messages loaded, then it 
should only load a few at a time from files.

Comment 7

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

Any ideas what a good algorithm would be? An application needs to have more 
memory per window if there is more free system memory, but there still needs to 
be a bottom line that must be fulfilled even if the free memory is low. If that 
bottom line can't be fulfilled, then Mozilla should stop allocating mem and put 
any part of the app that requires more mem in a sort of "standby" mode (bug 
70824).

Comment 8

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

-> not mine.

Comment 9

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

testcase if you dare ;-) -> http://mozilla.netdemonz.com/bugs/testcase2.html

Comment 10

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

That testcase bloated my mozilla mem usage to 94 mb. I believe that if I had 
made that page larger (say 100MB) Mozilla would have kept trying to open it 
till it used all the hard disk virtual mem and would bring the system to a 
standstill and cause a reboot to be the only discourse.

Comment 11

[basic]

Sending to XPApps (it sounded like it belonged there)

Comment 12

[Peter Trudelle]

probably a dup of some other perf bug, reassigning to cathleen

Comment 13

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

I think the odds of this ever being fixed are pretty low.

Comment 14

[Ichigo Kurosaki]

I've seen firefox suck up over 1.8GB of my RAM. I've had it open about 4 hours and the usage is at 494MB with a peak of 523MB.

Comment 15

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

We should understand if we really want this feature. Otherwise mark it as WONTFIX.

Comment 16

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

We recently removed some limits of this nature from the JS engine because they're an enormous pain.  And also see comment 13.  I will close this.