Today I set myself the task of visiting all the sites on the Alexa Global Top 500 Websites list to see if any of the pages caused memory leaks on the Firefox trunk. I was using an hourly build (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/20070620 Minefield/3.0a6pre ID:2007062013) which is the build just after the new text-frame stuff was turned on. Using a new profile, I would open 10 or 15 sites in new tabs at a time, wait for them to load, then close firefox and analyse the nspr.log for leaks using dbaron’s perl leak-gauge.pl script.
After a whole load of clicking (and putting up with anoying sites that used audio) I ended up filing a whopping two bugs: 385082 which covers apparent leakage on wordpress.com (oh, the irony!) and 385251 which covers a memory leak when adding or deleting a bookmark.
So out of loading 500 different websites, I only found one which caused a memory leak. Although it should be noted that I didn’t do any navigating around each website, this is still a great result considering all the changes that have gone on in this area with Graydon’s XPCOM Cycle Collector. Next up, seeing if I can catch any naughty extensions leaking memory!
June 29, 2007 at 8:12 pm |
[...] Fixed: 385082 – Make nsDOMEvents collectable (to fix the leak on wordpress.com). This was the only leak Steve England hit when he loaded all of the top 500 web sites!) [...]
July 5, 2007 at 7:42 pm |
Sorry for just leaving the job for someone else, but could you please check AIO Gestures? Whenever I make gestures (with or without trail enabled) I see Firefox’s memory consumption rapidly increasing and never returning, and dbaron’s extension *always* tells me AIO leaked an object whenever I close a browser window. I commented on it on Mozilla Addons and on a few forums, but I never got any reply, and I don’t have enough knowledge to investigate further.
By the way, I’m talking about Firefox 2; I have no idea if it even works on trunk builds.
September 21, 2007 at 3:41 pm |
[...] all it takes is a visit to certain Web sites to give certain builds of Firefox a fit. Steve England wrote: Today I set myself the task of visiting all the sites on the Alexa Global Top 500 Websites list to [...]
October 19, 2007 at 5:02 pm |
[...] England tested the top 500 web sites, finding two leaks. Later, he tested the top 20 Firefox extensions and found leaks in several of [...]
October 15, 2008 at 2:52 pm |
This memory leak issue was a big problem for firefox.
August 30, 2009 at 7:58 pm |
Sorry for just leaving the job for someone else, but could you please check AIO Gestures? Whenever I make gestures (with or without trail enabled) I see Firefox’s memory consumption rapidly increasing and never returning, and dbaron’s extension *always* tells me AIO leaked an object whenever I close a browser window. I commented on it on Mozilla Addons and on a few forums, but I never got any reply, and I don’t have enough knowledge to investigate further.