914376 - noticeable memory leak when letting browser run for >20 h

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Alexander Stohr]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:23.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130814063812

Steps to reproduce:

i visited facebook.com using https access and maybe a bit of flash animation&video playback for a longer period of time, e.g. >20h.
the initial footprint (virtual size, measured by sysinternals process explorer) was some 700 MB.
the footprint seemd to steadily grow whilst surfing and whilst just letting the machine run in absence of an operator. (facebook is re-loading the advertisements, lets the chat windows receive new messages and the wall gets updated any few minutes)
surfing in gallerys and albums and on image intense facebook profile walls seems to be able to raise the problem more quickly.


Actual results:

the memory footprint grew and grew and grew with only small drop backs.
the memory footprint then reached 1,8 GB of memory.
finally the memory footprint went close to even 3 GB (i am having enlarged the user space to something bigger in the system and firefox can use it - but i had the problem even before i tried that tweak.).


Expected results:

i would like to find out what is the root cause of that memory growth.
i dont know which means i can apply to find the area where those memory leak is located. hints are welcome.
i am not sure if a facebook page reload via the address bar does have much impact
other than starting with a short page again.
i indeed would like to have more information and control. but as of now i think that not even a force reload with clear of local caches will have any noticeable impact on the memory footprint.
the whole amount of memory that is used up makes me really wonder where that does come from. i found no way to track down its root cause...
even killing the flash container did not release much of memory - so it must be from somewhere else - from the ad-ons or from the cache management or from the bunch of scripting in that page. and the problem does not improve if anything open in tabs is reloaded...

Comment 1

[Michael]

What addons do you use?

Comment 2

[Michael]

Also, could you enter about:memory in your address bar and provide the output?

Comment 3

[Swarnava Sengupta (:Swarnava)]

in addition,
Does the problem still happen if you start Firefox in Safe Mode? (Safe Mode disables extensions and themes, hardware acceleration and some JavaScript stuff in order to exclude some possible reasons for problems. It does not disable plugins which are add-ons.) See http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode 

And does this also happen with a new and empty profile? See http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic%20Troubleshooting#w_8-make-a-new-profile and http://support.mozilla.org/kb/Managing%20profiles .

Comment 4

[Alexander Stohr]

i tried about:memory but the page stays blank and gray colored.

Comment 5

[Alexander Stohr]

i selected a browser extension called Social Fixer found at http://socialfixer.com that has an option for stopping auto-reload on the facebook news feeds (only advertisements will reload). by this the memory leak growth has diminished to nearly nothing now. that extension has many other nice features so its hard to find the feature in question. but its included on the "popular options" page and it can be found using a few keywords.

here is the entry that needs ticking in the second line to stop that page eating up all your memory:

[ ] Auto-click "More Stories" [3] times to get more posts, and [x] auto-load more posts when scrolled to the bottom.
  [x] Disable auto-refresh of the news feed to insert stories at the top

As of now i have worked around the problem with getting a few other benefits and so i will hardly be able to contribute to the issue. But its definitely there.

Comment 6

[u554753]

Hi Alexander,

Are you still having any issues with memory leaks in newer versions of Firefox?

Comment 7

[u554753]

Closing due to lack of response from the reporter. If you feel this bug is pertinent, then please comment with the requested information in Comment 6. Thanks!

Comment 8

[Alexander Stohr]

I am running the derivate Waterfox in version 43.0.4 and in the recent day i had to close it with a total memory footprint of 6 GB (private bytes) as reported by process hacker on Windows 8.1 x64.
I was not able to see extreme load ramp ups but the final size is pretty big - like 10 times of even a bigger flash video from YouTube.