firefox leakage

Jeremy Messenger mezz7 at cox.net
Wed Feb 1 11:53:48 PST 2006


On Tue, 31 Jan 2006 07:06:12 -0600, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:

> i386, freebsd 7-current, ibm thinkpad t41
>
> i have tracked a major memory leak (2g in a day, resulting in crash)
> to the current build firefox.  result of top -S -osize
>
>   PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU COMMAND
>  2166 randy         4  20    0   166M   108M kserel   3:51  0.00%  
> firefox-bin
>  1343 randy         1  96    0   126M 83500K select   2:44  2.00% Xorg
>  1394 randy         4  20    0   102M 51456K kserel   0:08  0.00%  
> nautilus
>
> and five hours later
>
>   PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU COMMAND
>  1343 randy         1 102    0   334M   277M select  10:06 15.28% Xorg
> 12780 randy         4  20    0   149M 85364K kserel   0:27  0.00%  
> firefox-bin
>  1394 randy         4  20    0   102M 51420K kserel   0:11  0.00%  
> nautilus
>
> notice the growth in xorg and only xorg
>
> so i ran xrestop and it's all firefox
>
>   res-base Wins GCs Fnts Pxms Misc  Pxm mem  Other   Total   PID  
> Identifier
>   5400000   532  44    1 12216  155 385312K    18K 385330K   ?    
> International
>   3a00000     0   0    0    1    0    2887K     0B   2887K   ?    
> <unknown>ox
>
> International is an open firefox tab.  if i close that one, the excess
> is just charged to a different tab.
>
> and it just keeps growing and growing and growing and ...

I am not sure if it will be easy to debug to see how it leaks. There are  
several ways that can cause Firefox to leak a lot of memory such as  
plugins, extensions, javascript or whatever. Even in Linux and Windows,  
there are several users that usually complain about how much Firefox uses  
memory and leak often. Maybe you can get more info if you rebuild Firefox  
with WITH_DEBUG=yes, unless you already have and not help. Try to disable  
plugins and other stuff to narrow it down.

Cheers,
Mezz

> randy


-- 
mezz7 at cox.net  -  mezz at FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD GNOME Team
http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/  -  gnome at FreeBSD.org


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