schapel wrote:No, no one is saying there isn't a problem.
](./images/smilies/eusa_wall.gif "Brick wall")
No you've just chosen to redefine what "a problem" is so
as to exclude what most people consider to be a memory
leak. Ever increasing VM size.
My definition of "memory leak" is generally in line with these
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3 ... S:official
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/memory_leak.html
http://searchwin2000.techtarget.com/sDe ... 33,00.html
They all vary some, but they also all agree on one common thing..
"an application allocations memory and then never returns
it to the system"
Just because you haven't seen an application or OS crash yet
doesn't mean that it's not leaking. Just because the OS can free
up that memory when the application is finally shut down, does
not mean that the application wasn't leaking up to that point.
While it's running, that is memory that can't be used by another
app. If you run out of swap space, the OS is every bit as
out of memory as if it runs out of physical memory. It just
takes much longer to run out of VM.
Now in an almost unbelievable twist of irony, while I was
composing a reply to your message, my machine which as
previous mentioned had been up for 34 days, chose to crash
with a BSOD a few minutes ago, forcing me to hard reset, reboot,
start over.. etc.. See
http://thud.us/images/bsod.jpg
I kid you not.
Anyway.. what I was going to say before I was so rudely
interrupted by an OS crash which *probably* wasn't directly
caused by Firefox but may have been a contributing favor due
to excessive memory allocation.. was this..
I happen to be a software engineer so I actually have
some real experience with this topic. My team develops and
supports a large (half a million lines of code) set of DLLs
which all run under a single multithreaded server app that serves
up requests for healthcare transactions. It services 30,000 users,
processing 200-400 thousand realtime transactions per day. It
runs continously for typically about two weeks between
releases (which force us to restart). It allocates and frees
blocks of memory anywhere from a single byte to 30MB at
a time millions of times a day and at the end of a week,
typically the real memory usage is around 45MB, and VM
is about 80MB and it leaks, yes leaks, about 2 or 3MB per day
which is better than it used to be, but not as good as we want.
By comparison.. My Firefox 1.0.1 process which had been running
for about 26 hours before the machine died, used fairly heavily
by one user, me, showed as having allocated 184MB of real memory
and 830MB of VM before the machine crashed. If I closed all but
one window, VM usage would drop to about 700MB and then
stay there indefinitely. That is a big memory leak.
And to answer someone's earlier questions.. Observed memory
leakage was the same regardless of whether plugins were enabled or
not. Memory usage was reduced slightly with the latest nightly
build, but it was buggy in so many other ways (lost such essential
features as "Find") that I had to go back to 1.0.1. .
To everyone else, sorry for the long post. That's why I didn't
want to get into this again, but a leak is a leak and this one is a
doozy. BTW, I wouldn't care, if I didn't really like Firefox a lot
so don't ever get the idea that I'm just bashing on the product.
ian
