Firefox 3 memory use explodes by itself randomly
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mozilla Firefox |
Invalid
|
Medium
|
|||
firefox-3.0 (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
Hi,
I noted that the recent versions of Firefox (3.0.4 and 3.0.5) would randomly explode in terms of memory use. It happened on at least the following two machines:
* laptop, Dell Lattitude D600 (768 MB RAM, Pentium M), OS: Ubuntu 8.10 with firefox 3.0.4 and later 3.0.5
* desktop, Dell Dimension 8250 (2 GB RAM, Pentium 4), OS: Ubuntu 8.04 with firefox 3.0.5
This problem happened to me today on the desktop, in which `top' reported the following memory use:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
10021 wirawan 20 0 109m 1684 1668 R 100 0.1 1472:19 ld-linux.so.2
9675 wirawan 20 0 2049m 1.7g 6312 S 2 87.9 22:23.60 firefox
I typically let firefox run for many days on this machine, as this is a desktop machine in office. The computer is also never suspended. Fortunately the computer has 2G of memory so I could still manage to bring down firefox without injuring the whole system. I post the other process too; It was actually Acroread 8; `ps faux' reports:
wirawan@orbital:~$ ps faux|grep '100[2]1'
wirawan 10021 3.9 0.0 111904 1688 ? R 2008 1485:20 /lib/ld-linux.so.2 /opt/Adobe/
I suspect that it was started as a plugin by firefox. Unfortunately I already killed everything by now. I am sure that this problem would appear again, and if it does, I will post more information here.
Firefox was upgraded yesterday to version 3.0.5, so it has been running for less than 24 hours. Other than the PDF plugin, and Ubuntu standard plugins (vlc, mplayer, divx, quicktime), I don't have any other plugins. Specifically, this firefox is not equipped with Adobe Flash plugin.
The last pages that I left on, (if I am correct, based on the firefox's sessions restored), are:
* http://
* http://
* http://
* http://
I don't recall how much memory this firefox uses last night, before this exploded today. Probably I should make a simple cron job to collect the stats of firefox, eh?
Usually the memory explosion happens when the computer is idling and screen saver is running. I wonder if there *is* indeed correlation between these two. In the past, I never encountered this kind of memory explosion in the past with firefox 2, if I remember it correctly. Another thing that I suspect is whether heavy-duty pages such as Yahoo mail (the new interface) is a culprit also. I cannot confirm this yet.
If anyone ever experience this kind of problem, please add your comment. It is very annoying that now firefox becomes a time bomb in my computer. What I do temporarily as a workaround in my laptop is to add the following limitations on its startup script (/usr/lib/
# Limiting virtual address space, data segment, and resident memory
ulimit -d 500000
ulimit -v 500000
ulimit -m 250000
This is *not* without its own peril, as I observe that firefox's vmsize can grow quickly although the real rss is not that big.
Wirawan
Changed in firefox: | |
status: | New → Confirmed |
Changed in firefox: | |
status: | Unknown → New |
Changed in firefox: | |
status: | New → Invalid |
Changed in firefox: | |
importance: | Unknown → Medium |
Hi Wirawan,
I recently ran across a similar problem in Intrepid. If I left Firefox running, it would eventually consume all of my memory and cause lots of problems. I spent a considerable amount of investigating this, and I recently determined that it was actually caused by leaving Firefox open with Best Buy's website. This is likely to be the cause of the your problem as well as you listed bestbuy.com as one of the websites you had open when Firefox started gobbling up memory. Also, this doesn't appear to be an Ubuntu-specific problem. I was able to reproduce this with the Windows version of Firefox as well. Thus, I plan on reporting this apparent bug to Mozilla.
Scott