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open.spotify.com Memory Leak

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  • Last reply by itaton

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I'm basically having the same issue as in: https://support.mozilla.org/de/questions/1211844 Sadly support.mozilla.org doesn't allow me to comment on other issues without having first asked a question.

That question is from back in April but I still experience this issue multiple times per day. When Spotify changes songs (after one finished playing) there is about a 5% chance for a memory leak to occur. When this happens it takes about 20 seconds for Firefox to fill the remaining 4GB of my RAM.

One could argue that this is an issue for spotify and that they didn't code their website properly, but nonetheless I guess it shouldn't be possible for a website to DoS Firefox (and my system, after it starts swapping) that way. Is it possible for Firefox to automatically stop a website that suddenly misbehaves? Or is there a way to set a memory limit per tab somewhere in about:config?

I'm basically having the same issue as in: https://support.mozilla.org/de/questions/1211844 Sadly support.mozilla.org doesn't allow me to comment on other issues without having first asked a question. That question is from back in April but I still experience this issue multiple times per day. When Spotify changes songs (after one finished playing) there is about a 5% chance for a memory leak to occur. When this happens it takes about 20 seconds for Firefox to fill the remaining 4GB of my RAM. One could argue that this is an issue for spotify and that they didn't code their website properly, but nonetheless I guess it shouldn't be possible for a website to DoS Firefox (and my system, after it starts swapping) that way. Is it possible for Firefox to automatically stop a website that suddenly misbehaves? Or is there a way to set a memory limit per tab somewhere in about:config?

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Hey! Huge thanks for debugging this issue! We really appreciate it.

Did you check to make sure you don't see the same results in Chrome or another browser? Not that you need to use Chrome (especially if you distrust/hate it). Just very curious if the memory leak can be reproduced for you there too.

Also I couldn't determine your OS. Feels like it might be Windows 10 w/ all the latest patches? And latest Firefox? And I see your 5% memory leak chance estimate. But I'd like to ask about how many songs would you say need to play before one could expect to hit this bug? I'm imagining you playing songs from a large playlist over the course of a day/24 hrs & then eventually you hit this bug.

But if it's a bit harder than that to reproduce it, then I'll like to know a few extra details. Like how many total songs in the playlist you usually pick or how many hours you've kept Spotify open for in the browser before hitting the leak? Or anything else you think might matter. Hopefully it's Spotify fault but we can still file a bug to get our devs to investigate. You can register a account at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org & file your bug. Post the bug link back here & I can try to steer some extra attention/developer eyes at it.

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Thank you for your quick reply!

I didn't check with chrome, but I guess I could check over the next couple of days. UPDATE: I checked with chrome on Win 8.1 and haven't had the problem during the many hours I had spotify songs playing.

This happens for me on a fully patched Win 8.1 with the latest Firefox. I could also try it on Linux (Arch) over the next couple of days. (I switched to the desktop client there a couple of month ago)

It's hard to give an exact number of songs after which this issue arises, but maybe about 30 (just a guess from memory) This happens for playlists sufficiently large (>30 Songs) but also for the 'Radio' mode of spotify. The memory leak occurs no matter how long Firefox was open (happened about 1h after opening Firefox today)

I'll try to do some more testing as you suggested, and then eventually file a bug. (might be a little while though, not very much time atm)

Thanks again for the quick help!

Modified by itaton