Wandering Thoughts archives

2012-05-13

My experiment with Firefox Nightly builds: a failure

Ever since my old Firefox build started crashing and I was forced to update to current versions, I've had serious memory issues with Firefox. I used to be able to leave Firefox running for weeks (or months) with basically stable memory usage. Now, Firefox will steadily bloat up from under a GB of resident memory at its initial steady state to, say, 1.5 GB in a few days at most. Although my current machine has 16 GB of RAM, Firefox progressively gets slower and slower as its resident memory grows; by the time it reaches around 1.5 to 1.6 GB resident the performance is visibly dragging and I have to restart.

Recently I stumbled across this Mozilla blog entry on Firefox memory usage, which discusses how current Firefox builds have changes that reduce memory leaks, especially a drastic reduction in zombie compartments (see this entry for more). Ever since I discovered the verbose about:memory information, I've noticed that I have zombie compartments that linger from my ordinary browsing; the longer I browse, the more zombie compartments build up. A Firefox change that actually dropped zombie compartments seemed very promising, certainly promising enough to build a current version of Firefox and see what happened.

(Thus this is not quite an experiment with the literal Nightly builds, although it should be very close; as far as I understand, they're built from the same source repository (see also) that I was using.)

Unfortunately, the experiment turned out to be mostly a failure, although a sort of interesting one; in some ways Firefox improved but in other ways it got significantly worse. I tweeted a cryptic short form version, and I feel like elaborating on it now.

What improved was Firefox's responsiveness as its resident memory grew. Firefox 12 visibly starts slowing down with as little as 1.2 or 1.3 GB of resident memory; the current Firefox code was still running almost as well as at start when it reached 2 GB or more of resident memory, and it might have kept going even as it bloated more. What did not improve was everything else. I still saw zombie compartments (probably just as many as before) and if anything Firefox memory usage grew faster than under Firefox 12, reaching 2 GB resident in a day or two. But the worse thing was that at home, Firefox would soon get into a state where it was constantly using CPU (apparently talking with the X server). In this state it would not shut down gracefully; I could quit Firefox and it would close all its windows, but the process would not exit and would continue consuming the CPU talking with the X server.

(I had to use 'kill -9' to get it to exit, and this happened more than once with builds across several days. It was also odd CPU usage; it showed clearly in top but did not affect the load average and didn't lag the X server that I could tell.)

Unclean shutdowns aren't something that I considered acceptable in this situation so I am now back to Firefox 12, memory bloat slowdown and all.

It's possible that the current Firefox codebase will improve as it marches towards release, eliminating the memory bloat and 100% CPU usage while preserving responsiveness as its memory usage grows. I could live with that and it certainly would be an improvement over the status quo. (In some ways, simply eliminating the CPU usage would be a bit of an improvement over the status quo, although I don't like Firefox consuming several GB of my RAM for no good reason.)

(Despite the result, I don't regret doing this experiment; it was worth trying and it didn't particularly explode in my face.)

Update, May 17th: It seems that most of my Nightly memory problems were probably due to a single old extension I was using. See this update.

Sidebar: dealing with this with Chrome or by disabling extensions

Chrome is not something I consider an acceptable alternative to Firefox, so switching to it is not an option.

One piece of advice the Mozilla people give about this sort of memory bloat is 'disable unnecessary addons'. Well, I don't have any of those; all of the addons I have loaded are ones that I consider either absolutely necessary (to the point where I would not browse without them) or important for how I use Firefox.

(I suppose there's one or two that I don't use very often, like It's All Text!, but it would be actively painful periodically.)

FirefoxNightly-2012-05-13 written at 21:36:57; Add Comment

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