Does anyone else have a huge memory leak in Firefox 1.5?

[IdioticBuffoon]

Originally posted by: CTho9305
Firefox definitely does have leaks. I don't think you'd find any developers who would deny that. A developer would also tell you that it's not "a" memory leak, it's "lots of" memory leaks. Users who deny it are either fanboys, lucky, or don't leave it open for many days. The rabid fanboy hype machine does a good job of screaming at anyone who does mention leaks enough that they go away. Note that (in my personal experience, and based on discussions with other competent users) using tabs seems worse than using windows for everything leak-wise.

Changing prefs related to cache size isn't going to do squat. Most people who tell you to set it to some "small" value are actually picking values much larger than what the app picks itself by default (it uses a sliding scale based on how much ram you have - for most normal RAM sizes it picks well under 32MB).

Have you checked the bug database? Have you filled out a bug report? If you do, I hope you decide to include more information thatn this...

I don't think anyone really wants more memory leak bug reports like the ones we have - 99% are from idiotic users who think memory usage = memory leaking, and 99% of the remaining 1% can't figure out how to provide useful info.

Well put :thumbsup:. I agree that the "rabid fanboy hype machine" :laugh: can be pretty ... well, rabid at times and discouraging. Being an end-user, as all of us are, I just want a reliable program that is a notch above the crop. Granted, it's free but I would even pay for it if it performs much better than the alternatives, namely IE, Opera etc.

So, a word to fanboys: let's keep the fanfare to a minimum. It's not like they are paying you, are they?

I didn't think so.

 

[Nothinman]

Firefox definitely does have leaks. I don't think you'd find any developers who would deny that. A developer would also tell you that it's not "a" memory leak, it's "lots of" memory leaks. Users who deny it are either fanboys, lucky, or don't leave it open for many days. The rabid fanboy hype machine does a good job of screaming at anyone who does mention leaks enough that they go away. Note that (in my personal experience, and based on discussions with other competent users) using tabs seems worse than using windows for everything leak-wise.

Either I'm extremely lucky or they're lots of very, very small leaks that take a very, very long time to add up because I leave FF open on my work machine constantly and never see it's memory usage get to the point where it causes performance problems. I don't have any numbers since I'm not at work right now, but if I had to guess I'd say I've had FF open for at least a month on that machine.

 

[Anton74]

Either I'm extremely lucky or they're lots of very, very small leaks that take a very, very long time to add up because I leave FF open on my work machine constantly and never see it's memory usage get to the point where it causes performance problems. I don't have any numbers since I'm not at work right now, but if I had to guess I'd say I've had FF open for at least a month on that machine.

I suppose that wasn't FF 1.5 then, because it was released November 29? Or was it a pre-release version? The memory issue people are complaining about (in this thread anyway) are related to version 1.5.

Can I ask which extensions you have installed, if any?

 

[Anton74]

After average activity spanned over a large portion of the day (17 tabs open now, plus this reply window), memory usage is reported at 61M, and VM size for FF is 103MB. (Can someone explain that to me btw? There is no swap file.)

Whether you have a pagefile or not is irrelevant, VM is not equivalent to pagefile usage.

I understand that, but the thing I don't understand is the difference between the 2. As far as I can tell the Commit Charge is increased by the VM size for a given program, so that seems to be how much memory it's using - but then what does Memory Usage refer to, which is sometime more, sometimes less than the reported VM size?

 

[CTho9305]

The memory issue people are complaining about (in this thread anyway) are related to version 1.5.

I don't really believe that. From what I've read, people complain about basically the same things... of course, none of them actually give enough information to make an accurate diagnosis.

Can I ask which extensions you have installed, if any?

Extensions in general are a good way to mess stuff up, and I generally consider problems reported from people using lots of extensions close to useless. Useful bug reports are those that can be reproduced from a clean install with a clean profile.

Either I'm extremely lucky or they're lots of very, very small leaks that take a very, very long time to add up because I leave FF open on my work machine constantly and never see it's memory usage get to the point where it causes performance problems. I don't have any numbers since I'm not at work right now, but if I had to guess I'd say I've had FF open for at least a month on that machine.

How many new tabs do you create in a day?

 

[Nothinman]

Can I ask which extensions you have installed, if any?

Probably just adblock, I don't install too must crap on my work machine since I use my personal laptopf or most things.

I understand that, but the thing I don't understand is the difference between the 2

The pagefile is just a backing store, a place to keep data that's not currently needed in memory. VM is just the set of addresses that each process gets, 4G on a 32-bit system (with 2G reserved for the kernel) and every time that process allocates memory, mmap's a file, loads a library, etc addresses and thus VM is used. You don't need a pagefile to use VM, but without the pagefile more pressure will be put on main memory because every page that doesn't have a backing store (i.e. an executable can be reloaded from it's file on disk) has to be kept in main memory since there's no pagefile to store it in. And I think there might be some memory functions that fail without a pagefile, but they're only used by odd programs like Photoshop AFAIK and I don't know what they are because I'm not too up on Win32 programming.

People confuse the pagefile and VM because of the extremely poor wording used by MS in their UI and docs, there's even some MSDN articles that misuse the terminology.

As far as I can tell the Commit Charge is increased by the VM size for a given program, so that seems to be how much memory it's using - but then what does Memory Usage refer to, which is sometime more, sometimes less than the reported VM size?

As I understand it, Commit Charge is supposed to be the amount of physical memory being used by the system. So it can increase when VM increases, whether it does or by how much depends on why VM usage increased though.

If you really want to understand this stuff get a copy of "Inside Windows" and read the chapter on memory management. Also "Understanding the Linux kernel" would cover the same ideas and let you understand the theory behind the VM system even though the implementation details are different between the OSes.

 

[Nothinman]

How many new tabs do you create in a day?

Create? Probably not many since I pretty much always have the same set of tabs open. I'll create 1 new one probably a half dozen times in a day looking at new pages, but usually it's the same tabs open all of the time. And if I had to guess, I'd say I leave between 20 and 30 tabs open consistently.

 

[CTho9305]

As I understand it, Commit Charge is supposed to be the amount of physical memory being used by the system.

That can't be the case, because I've seen commit charges above my RAM size (e.g. right now - 1266MB, but I only have 1024MB of RAM).

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

How many new tabs do you create in a day?

Create? Probably not many since I pretty much always have the same set of tabs open. I'll create 1 new one probably a half dozen times in a day looking at new pages, but usually it's the same tabs open all of the time. And if I had to guess, I'd say I leave between 20 and 30 tabs open consistently.

I create one new tab pretty much for every link I click (when searching one tab per result, one tab per thread on forums, etc). The longest history on any of my 5 currently open tabs is 7 deep (this thread, over and over again ). Try surfing like that and see if it gets worse.

 

[Nothinman]

I create one new tab pretty much for every link I click (when searching one tab per result, one tab per thread on forums, etc). The longest history on any of my 5 currently open tabs is 7 deep (this thread, over and over again ). Try surfing like that and see if it gets worse.

I do surf like that, but I do 99% of my surfing in Galeon on my notebook. Usually on my work machine I open a new tab, read whatever and then close that tab because I don't care any more. When I use Google I'll end up opening a half dozen new tabs at once clicking on results, but most of my browsing at work consists of opening a URL from an email and using the existing tabs that I already have open.

 

[CTho9305]

Try it in Firefox or SeaMonkey

 

[xtknight]

My Opera uses almost exactly 64M of memory (65412K). 21 tabs open.

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

OK, I've disabled all extensions, and my disk cache is set to 50 MB (as it always is); let's see if the situation improves. Currently it's using 28MB.

Is there a way to limit memory caching? I want it enabled but I don't want it hogging 200MB of RAM. I'll post an update after using it for a couple of hours to see how the memory usage changes.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Used FF for a day, opened a heck of a lot of tabs/windows. Closed a heck of a lot of tabs/windows (some on accident by the crazy placement of the close tab option ). FF is only using 95MB of ram. *yawn*

 

[CTho9305]

Is there a way to limit memory caching? I want it enabled but I don't want it hogging 200MB of RAM. I'll post an update after using it for a couple of hours to see how the memory usage changes.

It's not the cache - it's probably real, honest-to-god memory leaks.

 

[Anton74]

I've done some quick'n'dirty tests, and came up with these numbers (did 3 runs each, there seems to be some more or less random variance):

- all extensions disabled, manual loading of 21 tabs (all at once from bookmarks): mem usage / VM size 73M/66M, then 68/52, then 68/61
- all extensions disabled, no pages loaded: 17/9, then 16/9, then 16/9 (loading only this forum page after that: 25/18)
- SessionSaver Enabled, same 21 tabs auto-loaded: 74/60, then 73/66, then 75/60
- Talkback, Forecastfox, Autocopy, Paste and Go, Web Search Plus, LastTab, IE VIew, ReloadEvery, Tabbrowser Preferences, SessionSaver, Googlebar Lite enabled, 21 tabs auto-loaded: 77/70, then 78/63, then 77/70
- Same, with AdBlock added: 79/65, then 78/72, then 79/64

It's been more than 24 hours now, and I've browsed like normal with all extensions disabled, and memory usage is 64MB while the VM size is 92MB - with only this page open (plus the reply window). As reported above, this was 25MB and 18MB respectively, after this same page was loaded in a freshly started FF.

At one point, when FF was minimized and the commit charge was about 450MB (there's 512MB RAM and I've temporarily disabled the pagefile), FF's memory usage dropped to 10MB while the VM size - which is what seems to bump up the Commit Charge - remained near 100MB. I'll just have to read up on what's what in that arena because I still don't understand the difference between the two.

It appears that while the VM size can sometimes drop some (like when closing tabs), over time it's "floor" goes up, while this is not the case for "memory usage" (all this as reported by Task Manager). This must be some kind of leak I imagine. While it's not utterly horrible (without extensions anyway), it's certainly not pretty, and I hope we might see this addressed fairly soon in a bugfix release like 1.5.1.

I think I'll begin enabling extensions soon, and see what happens then. I suspect one (or more) or them are going to aggrevate this problem noticably.

Anton

 

[ShadowBlade]

54MB right now

 

[Miramonti]

I've reverted back to 1.07, which is much more merciful with these memory leaks (altho not totally innocent.)

1.5 memory leaks have been too brutal, either slowing the browsing down and eventually crashing it altogether.

 

[rh71]

closing the browser tabs didn't release any memory for me... that was a "bug" or a "feature" perhaps... and I'm talking about the previous versions. I guess they still haven't addressed this.

 

[Anton74]

closing the browser tabs didn't release any memory for me... that was a "bug" or a "feature" perhaps... and I'm talking about the previous versions. I guess they still haven't addressed this.

As far as I can tell (and I haven't paid attention to this prior to 1.5, since I never had any trouble then), not releasing (much) memory - even after a long time and/or when memory is becoming very scarce - after tabs are closed is exactly the problem. (I'm talking about VM size here, since that is what seems to contribute to the Commit Charge, see earlier posts.)

I've observed this without any extensions installed, although I do believe there are certain extensions that add to the problem, or introduce their own.

Heavy use of the browser mostly brings out the problem (of course), and I think the Average Joe should not have noticeable problems. This is still something that needs to be addressed though, sooner rather than later if you ask me.

Anton

 

[firerock]

Another thing that I realize is that when I was using previous FF (before the new v1.5), when I minimize the window to the taskbar, FF will use much less memory than when the window is opened. Now, FF uses the same amount of ram no matter the window is opened or minimized. Strange...

 

[CTho9305]

Another thing that I realize is that when I was using previous FF (before the new v1.5), when I minimize the window to the taskbar, FF will use much less memory than when the window is opened. Now, FF uses the same amount of ram no matter the window is opened or minimized. Strange...

That's a preference - config.trim_on_minimize, I believe. The memory usage number you're looking at is not useful - the one that matters is "VM Size" in task manager.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Used FF for a day, opened a heck of a lot of tabs/windows. Closed a heck of a lot of tabs/windows (some on accident by the crazy placement of the close tab option ). FF is only using 95MB of ram. *yawn*

session saver

 

[daniel1113]

I wouldn't consider this a problem UNLESS Windows is unable to regain the memory used by Firefox when needed by other programs. After all, unused RAM is wasted RAM.

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

Update in the OP