Continuously refreshing a tab after an interval leads to high memory consumption (400MB to 800MB in 30 seconds for 3 refreshes at 10 secs interval), why?
Environment: MAC OSX 10.9.5 Firefox 32.0.3
Firefox keeps consuming lot of memory when you keep refreshing a tab after an interval.
I opened a single tab in my firefox and logged into my gmail account on that. At this stage the memory consumption was about 400MB. I refreshed the page after 10 seconds and it went to 580MB. Again i refreshed after 10 seconds and this time it was 690MB. Finally, when i refreshed 3rd time after 10 seconds, it was showing as 800MB.
Nothing was changed on the page (no new email, chat conversation, etc. nothing). Some how i feel that the firefox is not doing a good job at garbage collection. I tested this use case with lot of other applications and websites and got the similar result. Other browsers like Google chrome, safari, etc. they just work fine.
For one on of my application with three tabs open, the firefox literally crashed after the high memory consumption (around 2GB).
Can someone tell me if this is a known issue in firefox? and is firefox planning to fix it? Right now, is there any workaround or fix for this?
All Replies (12)
In the address bar, type about:crashes. Note: If any reports do not have BP in front of the numbers, click it and select Submit.
Using your mouse, mark the most resent 7 - 10 crash reports, and copy them. Now go to the reply box below and paste them in.
Hi FredMcD,
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, i don't see any crash reports in about:crashes. I am trying to reproduce the issue which will make browser to crash but somehow its not happening anymore but the browser gets stuck at a point. Here is what i am doing:
- 3 tabs are open with same page of my application. The page has several panels which has charts and the javascript libraries used for this page are backbone.js, underscore.js, require.js, highcharts.js - The page automatically reloads after every 30 seconds - After the first loading of there three tabs, the memory consumption is 600MB. But after 5 minutes, the memory consumption goes to 1.6GB and stays at this rate. - After sometime, the page wont load completely for any of the tabs. At this stage the browser becomes very slow and i have to either hard refresh the tabs or restart the browser.
I have called for more help for you.
I am a novice in this area, but it sounds like the reloaded page is adding new processes at the reload, but not stopping the old processes.
Sure, thanks.
Yes, even i think something is not cleared or stopped on page reload.
Hey FredMcD,
Any update on this? Thanks.
I have put in a call. I may take a little time. Sorry :-/
Surprisingly this does not happen when I refresh the page, however the cpu does fluctuate up and down as I refresh the page in the Activity Monitor.
I would be happy to suggest about:memory as a tool to release unused memory or the add on Ram back to create a convenient button to release unused memory. Firefox uses too much memory or CPU resources - How to fix
Does this happen in Safe Mode? Diagnose Firefox issues using Troubleshoot Mode
Hi guigs2,
Thanks for the reply. Actually, i have already tried all these things and unfortunately they were not helpful at all. The page works fine on all the other browsers. The issue happens only in Firefox.
I upgraded the firefox to the latest version (33.1) and still there is no improvement :(
Hi mp, Are the same add ons still valid for this performance, I did also find: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/freememory/?src=search
Hi guigs2,
Unfortunately, this add-on also does not help much.
Since, this issue is still not resolved in the latest firefox version, i have filed a bug 1141242 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1141242)