Why do we continually have to tolerate Firefox's ridiculous mem leak?

By WastedJoker
in Web Browser Discussion & Support

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Grand Master

The_Decryptor Veteran

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There are builds of Firefox made nightly (as well as hourly), and those builds are tested for correctness, speed, memory usage and such, as well as any memory leaks (it checks every byte allocated vs. deallocated)

So if there is a memory leak it's found and fixed quite quickly, because otherwise the build is marked as failing the tests.

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Grand Master

HawkMan

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Link please.

It doesn't. Yes, you found a bug: it's not necessarily Fx's fault. In fact, it was probably a plugin or extension.

YEs, ... well except for the fact I've seen it happen several times on firefox installs with NO, I'll repeat that NO, as in NONE, or ZERO, extensiosn addons or plugins installed. plain vanilla install.

at one point I even ran a plain firefox install for the pure purpose of testing this. then I decided I just didn't care and other browsers works better than FF.

and well you can claim anything you want, by my Opera pretty much hovers at 450 with ~50 tabs open, and caching both back and forth works fine on them all. you can tell by the fact you can go back and forth instantly. And by the fact it's enabled in the preferences.

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Grand Master

Kirkburn

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YEs, ... well except for the fact I've seen it happen several times on firefox installs with NO, I'll repeat that NO, as in NONE, or ZERO, extensiosn addons or plugins installed. plain vanilla install.

at one point I even ran a plain firefox install for the pure purpose of testing this. then I decided I just didn't care and other browsers works better than FF.

and well you can claim anything you want, by my Opera pretty much hovers at 450 with ~50 tabs open, and caching both back and forth works fine on them all. you can tell by the fact you can go back and forth instantly. And by the fact it's enabled in the preferences.

The 450 limit probably depends on your PC. I get a similar kind of limit on mine, with a similar amount of tabs open. However, I do not believe it is physically possible to keep the information of 50 live tabs in such a limited amount of RAM concurrently unless they are seriously simple pages - regardless of browser.

I am intrigued by your statements of having seen it yourself. Firstly, I should point out that it can be down to bad JS on an article - that has the capability of causing large memory usage. That requires no extensions or plugins. I also find it unlikely those installs had no plugins - not even Flash? You separate these examples from a later "plain" Firefox install, so I'm wondering what the difference was?

Do you still information on when/where this occurred? I would like to check if it's reproducible or if there are other reports out there of this.

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Grand Master

HawkMan

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The 450 limit probably depends on your PC. I get a similar kind of limit on mine, with a similar amount of tabs open. However, I do not believe it is physically possible to keep the information of 50 live tabs in such a limited amount of RAM concurrently unless they are seriously simple pages - regardless of browser.

I am intrigued by your statements of having seen it yourself. Firstly, I should point out that it can be down to bad JS on an article - that has the capability of causing large memory usage. That requires no extensions or plugins. I also find it unlikely those installs had no plugins - not even Flash? You separate these examples from a later "plain" Firefox install, so I'm wondering what the difference was?

Do you still information on when/where this occurred? I would like to check if it's reproducible or if there are other reports out there of this.

Well that brings us back to the bad coding thing :p

My point was that there are serious bugs in FF's memory handling that causes this bug.

the versions I specifically tested it on, no not even flash, java yeah probably since I used other usable browsers alongside, and it was one of the later FF 2 builds.

FTR I still run FF, as well as chrome IE8 alongside Opera as my main browsers, but that's merely because I don't want to mess with session loadings and stuff so I use them for specific purposes, like chrome is my XDA-dev browser, loading up with all my XDA tabs whenever I feel like checking about the different topaz builds and crap, since it's an utterly useless browser, fast ish (not that fast for actual browsing on regular websites that isn't 99% js though)but utterly useless.

I do wish I could get stumbleupon and cool iris in Opera though, but those two aren't good enough reasons to sacrifice everythign else in opera and replace it with a browser with a broken extension system where extension aren't properly isolated and can cause problem not just with each other, but with the host (browser) as well.

of course properly isolating them makes them a lot less powerful, but is what the new "extensions" essentially do, and since they+actual plugins can do everything extensions can do , only safer and properly, extensions are eventually going bye bye, if just to help firefox compete against other browsers without inherently instable extensions.

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GreenMartian

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Here's the thing, right. This bug does not seem to manifest an all machine configurations. The 1,000,000 people here saying "I have 2 dozen tabs open and it's only using 50 megs" are obviously not affected, and does not mean that there's no bug.

Like HawkMan, I've seen it happen on vanilla FF with my own eyes. It's like war; maybe you haven't seen it personally, but based on the stories of the vets, they're very real and horrible. Just because you've never experienced it, doesn't mean it's not there.

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Grand Master

Orange Battery

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It's like war; maybe you haven't seen it personally, but based on the stories of the vets, they're very real and horrible. Just because you've never experienced it, doesn't mean it's not there.

An excellent example, firefox users are facing the darkest and most testing of times. :rofl:

We are all heroes

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Grand Master

Kirkburn

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Posted (edited)
Well that brings us back to the bad coding thing :p

My point was that there are serious bugs in FF's memory handling that causes this bug.

the versions I specifically tested it on, no not even flash, java yeah probably since I used other usable browsers alongside, and it was one of the later FF 2 builds.

That JS on an webpage can use up lots of memory/CPU is not the browser's fault.

If I went to a webpage that was using JS to render something very complex what do you expect to happen? I wouldn't expect the browser to arbitrarily limit it, I would expect it to use my full system resources as guided by the OS.

In any case, the issue should be reproducible. That it doesn't occur on all PCs suggests something local to those PCs, such as the specific setup or the webpage.

I do wish I could get stumbleupon and cool iris in Opera though, but those two aren't good enough reasons to sacrifice everythign else in opera and replace it with a browser with a broken extension system where extension aren't properly isolated and can cause problem not just with each other, but with the host (browser) as well.

of course properly isolating them makes them a lot less powerful, but is what the new "extensions" essentially do, and since they+actual plugins can do everything extensions can do , only safer and properly, extensions are eventually going bye bye, if just to help firefox compete against other browsers without inherently instable extensions.

What you take as broken, I take as "by design".

Of course addons can cause problems with the browser. They can change the UI layout, change how it reacts, and change how you interact with webpages. I don't understand how you think it's possible to "isolate" them while retaining these abilities. You can move them into different processes - but that won't stop them individually crashing, or being able to use up lots of memory/CPU. If I have an addon that changes Firefox's UI, crashing is going to mess up the UI. It doesn't matter if it's in a different process, it's going to cause issues.

Extensions aren't going anywhere. Unless you want browsers to become overloaded messes of functionality (a real situation of bloat), users will always want to extend them with new abilities. As it is, people already complain that Firefox is getting too bloated!

I have 25 addons active on two different PCs, and have done for quite some time. If the system was 'inherently' unstable, I would have expected to see some sign of problems by now.

Edited by Kirkburn
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  • 2 weeks later...
Grand Master

Kirkburn

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ok ever since i upgraded to 3.6 it's been leaking like an SR-71

any idea which one it might be?

<snip>

if any?

Well, the first thing to do is try Fx without any of them enabled.

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  • 4 weeks later...
Grand Master

Azusa

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i don't know if this thread is "old" yet but anyhoo...

Isn't firefox still open source you know that thing where you can download the code and mess about with it and maybe fix something like say err a Memory leak?

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Grand Master

+M2Ys4U Subscriber¹

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ok ever since i upgraded to 3.6 it's been leaking like an SR-71

any idea which one it might be?

whatpq.png

if any?

Disable them all and enable them one-by-one until you find the culprit. Of course, it could be a combination of extensions that causing your problem.

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Grand Master

Sulphy

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wow... some usage! i rarely get above 240Mb.... even with a dozen or so pages open...! however, i am a Chrome convert... hardly use FF at all anymore...

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Grand Master

Sulphy

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...... but will the new FF make me want to change my alegiance to chrome... ?????? not too sure...!!! :whistle:

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Grand Master

The_Decryptor Veteran

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Does that mean they don't really exist?

There are obviously memory leaks in Firefox, it's an app with a huge source code tree.

Of course, what people claim to be "the memory leak" isn't actually a memory leak, it's just Firefox storing all the data it has to manage in memory.

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