Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 21181
Netscape 4.76 memory leak
Last modified: 2014-03-16 22:17:19 EDT
Big fat warning to everyone around: *** DO NOT use the 4.76 update! *** One of its undocumented features is a real ugly _memory leak_ which quickly eats up all virtual memory (128 MB RAM and 256 MB swap-space on my machine). Compared with real heavy use of 4.75, it is obvious that 4.76 is the cause of this memory consumption. The first time this happened, I was fast enough to kill it fortunately. It occured when I lauched Netscape Navigator for the first time to bypass the licence agreement at the beginning. I then quit Navigator and started Communicator immediately and suddenly heard unusual HD swapping noise. 'ps uxw' revealed that Navigator's processes were still busy doing something, apparently. The second time it happened shortly after startup of Navigator, while loading a few simple news pages at Yahoo!. Unfortunately, I was not fast enough to protect the system from locking.
Are you using java at all?
No Java at all. That means no JDK installed on this machine and Java disabled in browser. Just JavaScript is enabled. Since this bug might depend on glibc <= 2.1.94-3, I've decided to test-drive 4.76 with the new glibc 2.2.
Just checking ; the JVM has been notably leaky in the past.
Just like the problems with xmms and sendmail, I think this bug is caused by problems with the glibc pre-release snapshots. Well, either that or really some strange addition in Netscape 4.76. I'm successfully running Netscape 4.76 with glibc 2.2 for quite some time by now. But when I downgraded to glibc 2.1.94-3 just for fun ;-), it didn't take a quarter of an hour to get that memory leak lock-up again (I was replacing hardware components and had to reboot several times -- this was the best opportunity to load Netscape from scratch which takes longer than when it loads from disk cache). Note that I'm certain it has to do with the startup/shutdown procedure in Netscape 4.76. It has nothing to do with loading specific pages or running the browser for a long time. Also, it is not just an ordinary memory leak which slowly takes away chunks of memory, but -- provided that it occurs -- a real critical one which eats up the entire virtual memory in less than half a minute. Conclusively, as long as this misbehaviour does not happen with the glibc 2.2 update, I consider this as fixed.
I am using netscape-communicator-4.76-1 on Redhat 7 with glibc-2.2-12 and kde 2.0.1 ... Netscape freezes often and I am always ready to do a killall -9 netscape-communicator. It seems this happens when Javascript is active, or when I use email ... Perhaps there is some lock coming out from network delays?
> Netscape freezes often and I am always ready > to do a killall -9 netscape-communicator. Netscape usually just _seems_ to freeze. Wait 2-3 minutes and watch how it comes back to life. I don't know what it does meanwhile. Maybe its related to time-outs or close-to-deadlock like code choking on pages or DNS lookups. Try Galeon or Mozilla >= 0.7 as an alternative. (And to not start any confusion -- afterall, this bug has been closed since the glibc update -- I haven't had that memory leak since then.)