this website causes firefox to keep taking memory

[M. Walter]

Binary package hint: firefox

The following web site causes firefox (on Linux Ubuntu 7.04 or 2.0.7 on WindowsXP) to keep taking memory. Eventually RAM is exhausted and swapping begins. This causes the computers to become unusable. As far as I know, firefox does not crash, but it does need to be killed. When viewing the same site with IE, a large amount of memory is used, but it eventually stops taking memory.

http://www.mscsoftware.com/products/marc_whatsnew.cfm?Q=396&Z=400

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Sep 27 08:24:34 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.04
Package: firefox 2.0.0.6+1-0ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: amd64
SourcePackage: firefox
Uname: Linux oak 2.6.20-16-lowlatency #2 SMP PREEMPT Wed May 23 00:33:37 UTC 2007 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[Barry de Graaff (barrydegraaff)]

tried to reproduce this on 32bit machine, it is an annoying script but it uses 250MB of ram
and then everything remains stable.

Maybe it has something to do with the amount of ram firefox can use that is set in about:config

[M. Walter (m.walter)]

Thanks for looking into this on your end. I re-checked on a windows XP (32 bit) with firefox 2.0.07. I also fiddled with the
browser.cache.memory.enabled user set boolean false/true
in about:config. It started off set to "false" and firefox took 450 Mb before stabilizing. When I set it to "true" it took only about 180 Mb. have have not re-checked this on my Ubuntu box. I am hesitant to do so because of how it took my server down when it happened the first time. Maybe there were other things going on with my Ubuntu box at the time ...

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

This has since been fixed in firefox-2.0 please test to see if firefox-3 has same issue and if it does please open a new bug report using Help>Report a problem