2.53 memory leaks

[webmoebius]

FWIW, I tried making the change to SM 2.53.3 32 bit from 30 to 96... memory usage went up by around 200 megs... average was between 500 and 600 meg... went back to 30 and it is back down to the 300 right now with 6 tabs open. Nick

I suppose everyone's operating system environment can be quite different even if they were using the same OS version / release. I've written up my own report on both Win-XP Pro SP3 and Win-10 Pro 64-bit and have summarized my results in the postings, so you can take a look for yourself. But this is my own OS environment so I can't speak to how your OS environment would interact with the SM suite itself. So far in my tests the adjustment has produced definite positive performance improvements and page rendering improvements (of some pages that were unworkable up to this point) so I will continue to use it and also adjust other users I support SM on with this new enhancement since I'm familiar with their OS environment and have also set up SM for them.

This plus the new manual garbage collection that I've just learnt is manually triggerable via about:memory will especially keep RAM use well in check under Win-XP Pro SP3 32-bit environment itself.

[ndebord]

FWIW, I tried making the change to SM 2.53.3 32 bit from 30 to 96... memory usage went up by around 200 megs... average was between 500 and 600 meg... went back to 30 and it is back down to the 300 right now with 6 tabs open. Nick

I suppose everyone's operating system environment can be quite different even if they were using the same OS version / release. I've written up my own report on both Win-XP Pro SP3 and Win-10 Pro 64-bit and have summarized my results in the postings, so you can take a look for yourself. But this is my own OS environment so I can't speak to how your OS environment would interact with the SM suite itself. So far in my tests the adjustment has produced definite positive performance improvements and page rendering improvements (of some pages that were unworkable up to this point) so I will continue to use it and also adjust other users I support SM on with this new enhancement since I'm familiar with their OS environment and have also set up SM for them.

This plus the new manual garbage collection that I've just learnt is manually triggerable via about:memory will especially keep RAM use well in check under Win-XP Pro SP3 32-bit environment itself.

webmoebius

This is an Acer Spin1 small convertible laptop. Small drive, 4 gigs RAM... not the fastest computer out there. Windows Pro, 1909 and a 64 bit system, although most everything I use is 32 bit from my previous computers (most everything here is a portable app as I go back and forth from a USB stick to this laptop).

Stayed with XP PRO SP3, plus unofficial updates for many moons, then got Windows 7 Ultimate and stuck with until that old Dell Latitude bit the bullet. This little Acer is good enough for now. I use the toolbar buttons "Open Favorite App" icon set to about:memory to occasionally remove excess memory.

Nick

[webmoebius]

This is an Acer Spin1 small convertible laptop. Small drive, 4 gigs RAM... not the fastest computer out there. Windows Pro, 1909 and a 64 bit system, although most everything I use is 32 bit from my previous computers (most everything here is a portable app as I go back and forth from a USB stick to this laptop). Stayed with XP PRO SP3, plus unofficial updates for many moons, then got Windows 7 Ultimate and stuck with until that old Dell Latitude bit the bullet. This little Acer is good enough for now. I use the toolbar buttons "Open Favorite App" icon set to about:memory to occasionally remove excess memory. Nick

Yes, 4GB RAM for Win-10 Pro is considered on the low side (by a lot of articles out there on the subject of Win-10 RAM), 8 GB more comfortable and 16 GB or higher will give the user a lot of leeway, though this subject is well beyond the scope of this thread. It will also depend on other OS environment settings like swapfile size, etc, as to how an application could be allocated RAM resources by the OS. Under Win-XP Pro the recognized RAM limit is a little over 3 1/4 GB, due to 32-bit addressing limitations.

[frg]

I suggest you don't tinker with internal spidermonkey or other Gecko specific parameters. If you do write down. what you change. They may change or be deleted at any time. They might help for very specific problems or while testing but usually the defauls are ok.

I can only say that I put in every fix I can find and which halfway applies. IanN does the same. Unfortunately we are still playing catch up and 2.53.x will still be with us for some time. It is not perfect and will evolve but don't expect wonders.

As for system specs. An i5 and 8GB should be fine. Windows 10 is unfortunately garbage and does a lot of background tasks which eat both ram and processing power. It is not designed for older systems. You can make it halfway decent with a lot of tweaking only and this is discared again with every major update. I am using it in am Vm only and tweak it manually but there are a lot of utilities out so you should pick one that suits you.

As for the memory problems- Anyone having them using Waterfox Classic? Does it work better?

FRG


FRG

[webmoebius]

I suggest you don't tinker with internal spidermonkey or other Gecko specific parameters. If you do write down. what you change. They may change or be deleted at any time. They might help for very specific problems or while testing but usually the defauls are ok.

As for system specs. An i5 and 8GB should be fine. Windows 10 is unfortunately garbage and does a lot of background tasks which eat both ram and processing power. It is not designed for older systems. You can make it halfway decent with a lot of tweaking only and this is discared again with every major update. I am using it in am Vm only and tweak it manually but there are a lot of utilities out so you should pick one that suits you.

As with any version / generation of Windows, the OS needs to be optimized by going into Windows service management and disabling various services that are unneeded, or don't need to be automatically started. Win-10 Pro is fine as an operating system. The event viewer also shows lots of logging for many different events, and I shut off as much as that as possible. Takes some time to get that all done. But in Win-10 it's pretty easy to check the task manager and sort it by CPU consumption to investigate and uncover which services / tasks in the background is sucking up system resources and then either shut down that Windows service or disable it from starting up during OS boot. ABOUT:CONFIG parameters that are non-default values are highlighted in bold and are therefore easily identifiable without taking notes of changes. Has never been a problem for me that way. I can easily get the best of Win-10 Pro + Win=XP Pro by running the Win-10 Pro computer in a Windows remote session window on the Win-XP Pro computer which has a large very high resolution Q-HD monitor attached to it, but I've found I've used it mostly for playing MP4 videos that Win-XP can't natively decode in-browser though that shortcoming is easily circumvented via a URL sniffer extension in the browser (e.g. SM or Firefox) and playing it in VLC-Player under Win-XP.

[therube]

As with any version / generation of Windows, the OS needs to be optimized by going into Windows

Not really (IMO).
Win XP, by SP3, Win7 by SP1, at those points MS had pretty much made the OS foolproof.
Gone were the days where you had to manually enable a software firewall.
Gone were the days where you had to visit some tweaking site & manually disable all sorts of settings.
Out of the box, they were mature, stable, & done right.

Contrast that with the (zillions, yes, I'll get arguments here) of things that go on in Win10.
These are not things that are for the users benefit (generally).
These are not things that users even see (generally).
Eat up memory, eat up CPU. Telemetry... It's all a good way to force hardware "upgrades".
You're forced to buy newer "better" "faster", only to end up where you had been (or even less) because all of the nonsense that is going on (behind the scenes, to your detriment).

I have XP boxes, 2 GB or RAM, that cold boot quicker, cleanly, then Win10 systems.
That's absured.


Oh, & do note the correlations between MS (what MS is today, with Win10 in particular), & what (was) Mozilla, (now) Quantum.

[mightyglydd]

That's absured.

What's absurd is yakking on about an OS that was EOL over 6 years ago....

[frg]

Lets not derail the thread too much. So far what we have is one site paperspace.com doing badly and about memory reports in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1616551 where I think this is because of overall severe memory shortage (not enough ram) together with email.

Oh and btw. not always fine with other browsers:
https://freenode.logbot.info/firefox/20200815#c4770567

I wish 2.57 would be in better shape becuase it has a bunch of later code in.

FRG

[ndebord]

Lets not derail the thread too much. So far what we have is one site paperspace.com doing badly and about memory reports in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1616551 where I think this is because of overall severe memory shortage (not enough ram) together with email.

Oh and btw. not always fine with other browsers:
https://freenode.logbot.info/firefox/20200815#c4770567

I wish 2.57 would be in better shape becuase it has a bunch of later code in.

FRG

frg,

Right now 442 megs of ram on a 4 gig little laptop. Livable IMO.

Nick

[webmoebius]

I have XP boxes, 2 GB or RAM, that cold boot quicker, cleanly, then Win10 systems. That's absured.

Without drifting the thread topic too much, yes, Win-10 is more complicated / convoluted, but bottom line in my own user experience with Win-10 Pro since version 2019.11 is that it's not noticeably different in performance responsiveness or boot time compared to my Win-XP Pro SP3 system that's fully loaded. I didn't find Win-10 Pro updates and update-reboots to be intrusive either as the Pro version allows for update and update-reboot deferrals. I'm only using it as a secondary computer and often nowdays within a Windows remote assistance window within Win-XP just to play some media types in-browser. It's fine as a second computer for P2P transfers which I let run overnight. Overall, after tightening Win-10 Pro as an OS by disabling and adjusting internal services, boot programs and logging. I don't find that it's noticeably worse than Win-XP Pro SP3. I'm happy with it and it is a useable OS going forward.

[DanRaisch]

And nothing in this recent OS discussion is actually SeaMonkey specific. If this is not going to return to a discussion of the original topic I will lock the thread.

[jwq]

frg,

In a new profile 1 window takes about 0.40 GB on macOS 10.15 with the default start page <https://www.seamonkey-project.org/start/>. Each additional window that opens adds about 0.14 GB bringing the total to about 1.5 GB with 9 windows. Running a new profile and using <https://www.stuff.co.nz/> (because it's resource-intensive) brought the total to around 4.5 GB. This is reproducible for me across restarts with sessions restored. It's also not the problem.

The problem is that as version 2.53 is used, with tabs opened and closed in the various windows, the memory used increases monotonically until, at around 6.0 GB there is a sudden onset of degraded performance (lags, beachballs). This is going to be the crucial step in reproducing the problem: using the browser so that memory is allocated. Using the "Minimize memory usage" button provides only temporary relief from the problem, and only once - trying it a second time provides no benefit. Closing tabs does not decrease the memory used and does not resolve the performance problems. Again, this was not observed on 2.49.

Just to be clear: I see this across three different machines with four independent profiles which were fine with 2.49 and show problems with 2.53. This is both reproducible and problematic for me.

[Frank Lion]

frg,

Running a new profile ...
... The problem is that as version 2.53 is used, with tabs opened and closed in the various windows, the memory used increases monotonically until, at around 6.0 GB there is a sudden onset of degraded performance (lags, beachballs). This is going to be the crucial step in reproducing the problem: using the browser so that memory is allocated.

A new profile has lower starting memory usage, and it would take significant time (5+ days) of use to reach the 5 GB memory use point.

Ergo it takes you 5+ days to reach the problematic 6GB point.

Solution - Restart the browser every 5 days.


See, er, frg, wasn't that easier than asking some poor slob to spend 5+ days reproducing your problem?

[therube]

In a new profile 1 window

1. 135
2. 154
3. 175
4. 198
38 ... 870
(2.49, XP, 2GB RAM, & a 2nd instance of SeaMonkey [this one] open, using 1 GB or RAM on its' own, plus everything else I have open)

[therube]

The problem is that as version 2.53 is used, with tabs opened and closed in the various windows, the memory used increases monotonically until, at around 6.0 GB there is a sudden onset of degraded performance (lags, beachballs).
...
Closing tabs does not decrease the memory used and does not resolve the performance problems.

To me, all that is expected, & there won't be much you can do about it.
And because it happens in no way indicates that there is a "memory leak".
(There might be, but by that description alone, one can't say.)

Again, this was not observed on 2.49.

Now that is more interesting.
Open a Profile in 2.49, perform the same steps, & if you get significantly different results, say in responsiveness alone (& regardless of memory usage because memory usage in & of itself is only an indicator of - memory usage), they one can say... what happened, why is there such a difference, what went wrong?

I see this across three different machines with four independent profiles which were fine with 2.49 and show problems with 2.53. This is both reproducible and problematic for me.

I'd say that bears investigating (just not sure where to say to start)?