Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 105699
Mozilla process bloats to hundreds of megabytes in size
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:57:52 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: I leave mozilla running all the time, because I do things like read portions of mailing list archives, go do something else for a day or two, and go back to what I was doing. When I start mozilla, I load the following URL's, which stay loaded all the time: https://my.secure.yahoo.com/ http://slashdot.org/ http://freshmeat.net/daily/YYYY/MM/DD/ http://plastic.com/ http://memepool.com/ http://metafilter.com/ http://fark.com/ http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/cacti/ http://www.redhat.com/archives/shrike-list/YYYY-Month/thread.html http://www.redhat.com/archives/psyche-list/YYYY-Month/thread.html http://www.redhat.com/archives/valhalla-list/YYYY-Month/thread.html Typically all but one of those sites would be minimized and any other URL's would be loaded in new windows which would then be closed. The problem is that after several days, the mozilla process grows to several hundred megabytes in size. I can tell when it's gotten large because there is a one second or longer delay between clicking above or below the scrollbar and seeing the current page move. My computer is an AMD XP 2600+ with 512 MB of system memory, so this should never occur! I do not have Java installed and these web sites use little, if any, Flash. My memory cache is set to 4096 KB. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 1.2.1-26 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Use mozilla for a few days. Actual Results: [jgotts@linux7 jgotts]$ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 513868 503640 10228 0 168624 110548 -/+ buffers/cache: 224468 289400 Swap: 1052248 464284 587964 [jgotts@linux7 jgotts]$ ps auxww | grep mozilla jgotts 11508 0.7 17.1 201904 87992 ? S Sep23 31:16 /usr/lib/mozilla-1.2.1/mozilla-bin (File->Exit) [jgotts@linux7 jgotts]$ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 513868 371004 142864 0 165748 100260 -/+ buffers/cache: 104996 408872 Swap: 1052248 163856 888392 As you can see, in only three days mozilla managed to consume a total of 552,536 KB of memory. I have to kill mozilla every few days or else my machine becomes unusable. I should also note that I did *not* experience this problem with Red Hat Linux 7.3. Expected Results: The mozilla process should much less memory. Additional info:
Yeah, I suspect we leak some memory. Have you had better luck with the 1.4 on the new fedora beta? Should be better than 1.2.1.
I have to sort of agree with this report. I've seen this problem from stock mozilla on RH9 to any rebuilt mozilla from rawhide after that (built by myself, running now what is essentially 1.4.1-15, same patches different packaging). It usually takes me only a few hours of browsing and reading email to trigger it. It becomes unbearably slow. It may have to do with memory but in my case it "only" reaches 60-70MBs which is not that much for mozilla (just restarted it now and it is 41MB). I suspect it is either linux/gtk2 specific or at least easier to trigger there as I've never experienced the same behaviour in windows. Note that as soon as you switch to some other applications, mozilla stops taking CPU time and machine is back to normal (until you go back to it). I'll try to attach gdb to it next time it happens. Any other suggestions?
If you're talking about a sudden change where mozilla churns and takes forever to draw, that's a bug down in Xft's memory management and has been fixed in recent releases. Mozilla probably has quite a few other random memory leaks, but I haven't seen specific fixes to them.
That might be the bug I was experiencing, except that I'm more patient than Josko and wait till mozilla bloats to several hundred megabytes. I might remove the stock Red Hat Linux 9 mozilla and try something more recent. What I usually do for non-crashing bugs is wait until the next release of Red Hat Linux, but since there will never be another release I better try a different strategy.
Are you saying there is a patch somewhere for XFree86 that's going to fix this? I'd be forever grateful if you maybe remember where you saw the report and the patch. If you are saying there is a patch for mozilla - it's not there in mozilla-1.4.1-15... In any case, I (and a number of my users) will be happy to test any fixes. In the meantime, I am fetching the rawhide XFree86 - will try to compile or backport all xft related stuff. Thanks for the clue.
I'm talking about a patch for the sudden slowdown problem, nothing more. That's a fix that's in Xft somewhere. Since I don't own the package I'm not sure when it was included. However, I do know that it was included in FC1.
Ouch, just had the mozilla process exceed one gigabyte of memory in under three days. At least my I/O subsystem is getting a good workout! I am going to try versions in Fedora or on the mozilla FTP site and report back whether they have the same problem.
Too old and not enough information to diagnose.
Try asking for more information.