[26746] in Athena Bugs
linux 9.4.19: firefox
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ken Raeburn)
Tue Feb 21 20:19:48 2006
Message-Id: <200602220119.k1M1JCL6024929@all-in-one.mit.edu>
To: bugs@mit.edu
Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2006 20:19:12 -0500
From: Ken Raeburn <raeburn@mit.edu>
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System name: all-in-one.mit.edu
Type and version: i686 9.4.19 (with mkserv)
Display type: Matrox Graphics, Inc. G400/G450 (rev 85)
Shell: /bin/athena/tcsh
Window manager: vtwm.gamma
What were you trying to do?
Leave a web browser sitting around, with a few web sites
loaded like www.cnn.com, www.websudoku.com,
www.wunderground.com/US/MA/Boston, etc. (Popups disabled.)
What's wrong:
In time, firefox consumes huge amounts of memory. It starts
at ~56M on my Red Hat system, but if I leave it around for a
few days, I find it's grown tremendously. This evening I
noticed it was at 600M.
A simple experiment: Start "firefox http://web.mit.edu/",
check the size with "ps". Hit reload a few times. (Be nice,
and wait for each reload to finish before doing it again.)
After 10 or 12, maybe more, check the size again, and it's
grown. Hit reload a bunch more times, and check again; it's
grown again.
I don't know if in this example it would grow without bound or
if there's some limit it's slowly growing towards. But in my
daily-use case, a browser left up for a week or two with the
above-listed sites, with a few sudoku games played now and
then, the process gets much larger than I think it's got any
excuse to be. This could just be a malloc fragmentation
problem or something, I don't know.
Maybe I should try running it under valgrind.... I'll also
try to remember to check the memory use before I leave
tonight, and after I get back, so the only activity should be
automatically reloading pages like CNN.
What should have happened:
For a small set of relatively pages, even with images, even if
the page automatically reloads every hour or so and some of
the images and other content changes, even with some moderate
amount of javascript loaded, the memory use should be
reasonable, and bounded.
Please describe any relevant documentation references:
[Please replace this line with your information.]
