[SOLVED] Firefox eats all memory!

M · Guru Joined: 12 Dec 2006 Posts: 427

Hi, I have a problem with firefox, it recently started to behave realy badly, it eats all my memory (4GB), eats swap and then freeze the system of course.
Sometimes it does that when I have a lot of tabs opened, and sometimes it does that with only one tab, and it does that also with pages that don't have flash at all. Doesn't make sense.
I had version 10, now I updated to 11 but same thing happens. I have an intel gfx card, and I use libdrm, mesa and xf86-video-intel from git, I update these regularly (maybe once in two weeks). Does anyone experience the same behavior?
I use intel driver from git because I have a libva patched mplayer, no problem with that. Can I use driver from portage and still have libva support in mplayer? When I tried last time it didn't work so I switched to git.

Thanks.

eccerr0r · Advocate Joined: 01 Jul 2004 Posts: 3000 Location: USA

Are you sure it's firefox? Do you have a 'top' dump when it's happening?

I have several Intel machines (stable version) from 945G to Sandybridge and don't have an issue with it leaking memory (and able to run World of Warcrack on each, so MESA/DRM works fine)...

I have not updated to 11, still at 10.0.3 or something like that... What webpages do this?

One thing I do that may be different from others is that I tend to quit my webbrowser often. Not sure if this is the reason why I never see leak issues on my machines.

I do have to say I have not gotten XvMC working on Intel graphics, but it sounds like this is becoming an obsolete standard so there's no point...
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M · Guru Joined: 12 Dec 2006 Posts: 427

Absolutely sure it is firefox, I watched it in htop. Sometimes I am fast enough to kill the process (when I notice stuttering begins), it needs just a couple of seconds to fill memory.
After that I can start it again and use it for some time.
There is no specific web page, sometimes it is gmail, sometimes some innocent wordpress blog, with couple of images and no flash. And as I said it happens also with just one tab opened. But my firefox instance is opened for the whole day, at least it used to be like that...

I think it is connected somehow with libdrm/mesa/intel , but maybe I am wrong. I also noticed recently that checkgmail (perl gmail notifier) icon is turned black (should be white when there are no new emails), that must be connected with the intel driver.

Oh, and I use git because of vaapi, not xvmc. It works really nice, cpu usage with hd movie is almost the same as the regular movie with xv, so I would like to continue use it. But I also like firefox

Jaglover · Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2012 4:03 pm Post subject:

You sure it's not a bad plugin/add-on?
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M · Guru Joined: 12 Dec 2006 Posts: 427

I am not sure, I will try to uninstall all extensions, I don't have many, adblock plus, download helper, webdeveloper, foxclocks. I noticed download helper had an update recently so that might be. As for plugins we all know flash is bad, but it didn't behave like this before. I have flash version 11.2.202.228 .

eccerr0r · Advocate Joined: 01 Jul 2004 Posts: 3000 Location: USA

I've never seen flash cause memory consumption issues; maybe speed. Same with the pdf plugin.

But strange that plugins should all be run in a separate process now?

If you're using Gnome, does epiphany do the same with the same workload?

Is this a fast leak or slow leak? Should be easier to determine what the problem is if it's a fast leak...
_________________
Core-i7-2700K@4.1GHz/8GB RAM/180GB SSD/Intel HD3000 graphics
What the heck am I advocating?

M · Guru Joined: 12 Dec 2006 Posts: 427

This is a fast leak, at least, it works for some time normal and then it needs just a couple of seconds to fill memory and boom. With google-chrome everything works normal, but I keep chrome just as a backup browser, for a situations like this one.

But, I think I might find the problem, I forgot that I had google-talkplugin installed, now it is disabled and so far it looks goods. Firefox is opened for couple of hours and I opened like 20 tabs so far, some heavy sites, and it still didn't crash the system, so I hope this plugin was the problem. I noticed that now talkplugin comes with something called talkplugin video accelerator or something like that, I don't remember seeing that before.

M · Guru Joined: 12 Dec 2006 Posts: 427

After I disabled google talkplugin everything works as expected, so this is solved. I really don't want to debug further. Thanks!