830411 - Multiple blank page tabs (about:blank) should use the same memory/RAM

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 681201

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Helmut von Strudel]

User Agent: Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux x86_64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.12

Steps to reproduce:

I opened several millions of tabs on Firefox 21 for Linux (Fedora 16)


Actual results:

My computer crashed (Firefox process maximized the RAM and the swap memory so I could not open tabs anymore)


Expected results:

Since all the tabs I had opened were blank pages, I thought only one object would be created in memory. Indeed, if Firefox developers had used the design pattern called "Flyweight" coupled with the "Abstract Factory". Here is a useful link for the resolution of this major bug : http://people.irisa.fr/Arnaud.Blouin/

Comment 2

[Scoobidiver (away)]

I don't think it's a major bug for that unrealistic testcase.
If the browser crashes, please provide the crash ID from about:crashes or a stack trace.

Comment 3

[[:Aleksej]]

I doubt it’s a Firefox crash.  Maybe csec-oom though.

Comment 4

[Scoobidiver (away)]

Helmut, do you have a stack trace (see https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/How_to_get_a_stacktrace_for_a_bug_report)?

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Scoobidiver from comment #2)
> I don't think it's a major bug for that unrealistic testcase.

isn't the real issue whether a page can be considered an object which can be abstracted as the user suggested?  (A crash or OOM can be produced by creating hundreds of almost anything)

Comment 6

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

This is not easy as it sounds. bug 681201 is essentially about the same problem, read from comment 7 on.

Comment 7

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

These are not really duplicates.

But the bug 681201 is about not-yet-restored tabs. Such tabs have some information. 

This bug 830411 deals with empty tabs, which bear no information at all. Such tabs are perfect candidates for the fly-weight pattern.

Comment 8

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

Look at bug 681201 comment 7 where it was morphed from the blank tabs case to not-yet-restored.

The issues discussed in that bug equally apply to empty and not-yet-restored tabs -- you're welcome to try to implement this without breaking anything, but the developers think it's too hard to be worth the effort.