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All modern web-browsers except IE9 are vulnerable to a huge memory leak

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Re: All modern web-browsers except IE9 are vulnerable to a huge memory leak

#51

Post by paulirish »

davidhollander wrote: post #49
StavrosK wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate how Opera never gets any love. It's been the most innovative browser for years now, it had tabs before other browsers even had an MDI and was fast even on my PC with 16 MB RAM.

I was a long time Opera user and love its configurability and full keyboard support for general browsing, but the Chromium dev tools won me over from a developer perspective and I disliked switching between the two.

You should check out the new Dragonfly. Grab the Opera Next build http://www.opera.com/browser/next/ to poke around. Dragonfly has gotten a masssive upgrade in the past 6mo.

That said, the Chrome dev tools are pretty righteous, too. :)

Re: All modern web-browsers except IE9 are vulnerable to a huge memory leak

#53

Post by davidhollander »

StavrosK wrote: post #50
davidhollander wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a long time Opera user and love its configurability and full keyboard support for general browsing, but the Chromium dev tools won me over from a developer perspective and I disliked switching between the two.

Hmm, I always prefer Firebug for development, but development and browsing are two separate tasks, so I have no problem using both. Chrome is a solid browser too, though.

Just booted up firebug due to your comment because I hadn't used it in a while. Here is my reaction after using Chromium dev tools:

- JavaScript auto complete text doesn't display right, it is a different font size shadow that obscures the typed text.

- Pressing tab multiple times will not cycle autocomplete, but instead jump the focus out of the console and into the search prompt.

- Really minor, but I prefer a terminal where the output and input are simply in the same line rather than in seperate locations that require looking back and forth.

- If I declare a function "hello" in the terminal, and then type "hello", it merely prints "hello()" instead of printing the source of the function. Printing the source of the function with no extra work is especially valuable if I grab the non minimized version of a new javascript library and want to poke around and see what everything does.

+ I do think the "Net" tab displays requests a bit more concisely than Chromium. This could be beneficial if you are dealing with pages with lots of pictures.

= CSS and DOM inspection seems about equal.

My main concern is JavaScript though, as my current app is doing all of its rendering client side with only the Model layer on server.

Re: All modern web-browsers except IE9 are vulnerable to a huge memory leak

#54

Post by davidhollander »

paulirish wrote: post #51
davidhollander wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a long time Opera user and love its configurability and full keyboard support for general browsing, but the Chromium dev tools won me over from a developer perspective and I disliked switching between the two.

You should check out the new Dragonfly. Grab the Opera Next build http://www.opera.com/browser/next/ to poke around. Dragonfly has gotten a masssive upgrade in the past 6mo. That said, the Chrome dev tools are pretty righteous, too. :)

Nice, just installed and I'm loving the JS terminal so far. Thanks for the link.

Re: All modern web-browsers except IE9 are vulnerable to a huge memory leak

#55

Post by othermaciej »

kevingadd wrote: post #44

This looks like a fairly old leak in all WebKit browsers. There's a year+ old bug about it filed against Chromium, and I think there's one against WebKit proper as well: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36142 Frustratingly, the chromium and webkit devs seem to have been ignoring it. In my case, it made one of my products completely unusable on all webkit-based browsers... which includes Android, Web…

Here's the upstream WebKit bug which has some more analysis:

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61006

Re: All modern web-browsers except IE9 are vulnerable to a huge memory leak

#56

Post by rbranson »

rbranson wrote: post #43
valyala wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is OK to have in-memory cache for certain resources. It isn't OK when this cache doesn't shrink under memory pressure. This usually leads to swap trashing after the cache becomes bigger than the available physical RAM on the system. Swap trashing makes the system unusable in most cases. See the comment #6 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=81517#c6 .

I've had Ruby processes run wild (think turning off the garbage collector) and grow to 20-30GB on my MacBook and it didn't make my system unusable. Things slowed down, but I could pretty easily open up the Activity Monitor and kill the offending process.

                        _,-%/%|
                    _,-'    \//%\
                _,-'        \%/|%
              / / )    __,--  /%\
              \__/_,-'%(%  ;  %)%
                      %\%,   %\
                        '--%'

Re: All modern web-browsers except IE9 are vulnerable to a huge memory leak

#57

Post by gsg »

argus wrote: post #40
windsurfer wrote: post #37

If swap trashing makes a system unusable, why not get rid of the swap and let the program crash? Isn't that the preferred behavior?

swapping is a fundamental part of a multi-tasking o/s and unfortunately unless a program starts writing into memory addresses that have not been allocated to it the o/s would not be able to know if the program is crashing or not (segmentation faulting)... to the o/s this bug would just look like a memory hungry program so it just keeps on allocating more memory... once all physical memory has been used up, the o/s ha…

You are conflating virtual memory and swapping. A disk-backed page cache is not necessary for memory protection.

Re: All modern web-browsers except IE9 are vulnerable to a huge memory leak

#59

Post by nitrogen »

kevingadd wrote: post #44

This looks like a fairly old leak in all WebKit browsers. There's a year+ old bug about it filed against Chromium, and I think there's one against WebKit proper as well: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36142 Frustratingly, the chromium and webkit devs seem to have been ignoring it. In my case, it made one of my products completely unusable on all webkit-based browsers... which includes Android, Web…

The bug you link here (36142) is important because demonstrations there show that memory grows unbounded even without using no-store (one demonstration uses images from the local hard drive, from whence no cache control directives could possibly be obtained, and eats through ~1.3GB/min of RAM).

Re: All modern web-browsers except IE9 are vulnerable to a huge memory leak

#60

Post by nitrogen »

rbranson wrote: post #43
valyala wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is OK to have in-memory cache for certain resources. It isn't OK when this cache doesn't shrink under memory pressure. This usually leads to swap trashing after the cache becomes bigger than the available physical RAM on the system. Swap trashing makes the system unusable in most cases. See the comment #6 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=81517#c6 .

I've had Ruby processes run wild (think turning off the garbage collector) and grow to 20-30GB on my MacBook and it didn't make my system unusable. Things slowed down, but I could pretty easily open up the Activity Monitor and kill the offending process.

In the highly unlikely scenario where you actually allowed the system to allocate 30GB of swap space, this might not cause the system to become unresponsive since most of the memory in "use" would never be touched, as it comes from discarded but uncollected Ruby objects.
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