Bug#641541: xulrunner-6.0: eats too much (well beyond available) memory

[Mike Hommey]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:11:01PM +0200, Luca Capello wrote:
> Hi Mike!
> 
> On Wed, 14 Sep 2011 11:42:31 +0200, Mike Hommey wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:37:57AM +0200, Luca Capello wrote:
> >> 3) I do not think that about 100 tabs (buffers in conkeror) is so much,
> >>    especially considering how many Mike has ;-)
> >> 
> >>      <http://glandium.org/blog/?p=2180>
> >
> > Note that I was using about 1.4GB memory when I had around 300 or 400
> > tabs and wasn't lazy loading them. I wouldn't be surprised that some
> > tabs on some sites would make that go up significantly.
> 
> The problem is that I had around 100 tabs and xulrunner-6.0 was using
> roughly 1-1.5GB VIRT memory, so is 1.5GB the upper limit?
> 
> >> I have now installed xulrunner-7.0 and I will report back what happens.
> 
> xulrunner-7.0 seems to use the same amount, let me see if it will be
> killed someday:
> 
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>  2886 luca      20   0 1147m 727m  24m S   10 36.3   3:27.64 xulrunner-bin

I think you have two problems:
- xulrunner takes a lot of memory, and that should be better in xulrunner
  8.0 and 9.0 (8.0a2 builds on mozilla.debian.net)
- conkeror actively loads all your tabs

We should probably clone this bug and reassign to conkeror.

BTW, about:memory should work in conkeror.

> Two things I have completely forgot to add while reporting the bug:
> 
> a) no external plugins here (no Flash/Gnash, no Java)
> 
> b) xulrunner is the main battery drainer (see the CPU/MEM consumption
>    above), which is a bad effect other than the hibernation one already
>    reported, here the powertop output for the same session above:
> 
>          Usage       Events/s    Category       Description
>      132.1 ms/s     373.4        Process        /usr/lib/xulrunner-7.0/xulrunner-bin

That's a different problem, but it's probably related to the number of
tabs you use.

Mike