Firefox memory leak issues
Here's a short article talking about linux firefox version:

Debian/1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.1-2


I'm seeing these types of 'memory leaks' as well, possibly they occur when using a different desktop but I can't say for sure.

Read the official mozillazine memory leak thread and the adblock bug report.


There's also a very long article in Information Week. Check this page out for tips on resolving this issue.

Normally I'm sceptical of these types of reports, but I've been seeing this too. That's the second of a two part series. Here's the first part.

Here's the mozillazine list of known leaky extensions. I'm not surprised to see adblock in there, however, in linux I don't believe the issues are actually fixed like the thread suggests.

CPU issues :: Firefox crashes in Linux
For the record, I'm seeing increasingly severe problems on Linux, debian sid [kanotix] Firefox 1.5.0.1] running on KDE 3.5. I'm seeing if I can pinpoint if it's an extension or if it's the default install.

It's gotten so bad though that I have pretty much switched to Konqueror since Firefox tends to freeze up whenever I switch desktops and leave a firefox open on another desktop with several tabs open, forcing cpu useage upto almost 100%. I have to kill the process to shut it down usually, but not always. Sometimes I can turn it off by closing it, but only half the time.

Not good.

I'm limiting extensions to see if I can find one that triggers the behavior, but if I have to surf without my extensions to use firefox on linux then there's no point in using it.

Here's the Firefox hangs page. Here's the mozilla suite diagnostic index page.

Currently the only way I can make firefox run without crashing in Linux is to run it in safe-mode. When I do that, I don't see any issues.

However, as soon as I start enabling my extensions [it doesn't seem to matter which ones], Firefox starts crashing again. To me it does not look like an actual extension issue, but rather something related to Firefox actually opening itself to extensions running, if that makes sense.
Back to top

For kanotix only:



This will remove any remaining mozilla-firefox stuff [debian now uses firefox, without the mozilla- prefix], as well as the [b]mozilla-firefox-locale-de[/b[ which may cause issues for non german users.

Also, in about:config, I'm trying to limit these:

browser.sessionhistory.max_entries 10
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers 1

note, I'm going to check these different settings to see if one fixes the cpu crash of firefox.
Back to top

SOLUTION
This applies only to the CPU part, but if you are running KDE and are having this issue, make sure you don't have the package gtk2-engines-gtk-qt installed.

That causes the stability issues I had, as soon as I removed it I was able to reinstall all my favorite extensions, add more extensions, with no problems at all.

There appears to be a direct conflict between kde - gtk2-engines-gtk-qt - gtk apps. This becomes evident once you have either many tabs open, or when you do complex things like switch desktops with different background colors, or transparent, hidden taskbars/panels.

Basically the problem seems to be that firefox, or any other gtk app that triggers this bug, will launch a series of errors due to some missing gtk stuff, and if you have enough of those errors, 1 set for each tab basically, combined with kde working hard to render its new screen, firefox just dumps.

gtk2-engines-gtk-qt also appears to cause significant issues in other areas, I noticed it on some javascripts, like the clock on the main site upper right corner, and on javascript written flash tags.

Just as example, the homepage of this site caused processor spikes of upto 60% just to display the home page, with flash and javascript running.

Once I removed gtk2-engines-gtk-qt, everything went back to normal, no more crashes, surfing tranquility returned.

Note: it looks like the debian firefox package is also not working quite right, when I compare a standard www.mozilla.com firefox download with the debian firefox, processor use is problematic on the debian package.
Back to top