firefox 4 does not release memory when adblock is enabled

[Wladimir Palant]

Yes, I think that this issue occurs only on some specific websites. askmen.com appears to be particularly problematic for whatever reason.

[Epidomis]

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink

Look like Mozilla is making memory usage in FF 5 a priority. Beside that little test, I do not have any conclusive proof that ABP + FF 4 add significant memory overhead. Hope to get more feedback from when FF 4 is officially released.

[fnukyguy]

just want to report that the popular addon "Video DownloadHelper 4.8.4" is causing the same type of leak when its enabled and just running in the background not doing anything...

[chaud]

Still happening with the dev version as well as stable with ABP being the only enabled addon.

[asdasdasd]

Firefox 4 is worse than Firefox 3.6 in memory use. Much worse. There is a bug that causes it to eat huge amounts of memory on sites with large images.

[dbcooper]

I would also check the gawker sites like gawker.com, io9.com, lifehacker.com, gizmodo.com.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=644457

[Wladimir Palant]

@dbcooper: Thanks. One thing that I am pretty certain of - Adblock Plus itself has no memory leaks, I spent way too much time hunting phantom memory leaks. But memory management in Firefox 4 appears to have some quirks still.

[dbcooper]

Hi Wladimir, a bug has been filed today about what may be one of those firefox quirks - using addons may trigger delays in FF's GC and CC delays:

Bug 645678 - GC Delay is increased by certain extensions right from launch

[Wladimir Palant]

@dbcooper: Wow... I had no idea extensions could influence that. Not that I can confirm the results of the bug reporter as far as Adblock Plus goes, I get the same delays with it on and off.

[dbcooper]

Yeah, it's quite unexpected ... Will be interesting to see if it can be reproduced and/or confirmed.

[Wladimir Palant]

Yes, I could confirm that our redirect detection hack delays garbage collection. Right now I am looking into ways to fix that.

[chrismc]

I saw a reference to the redirect detection issue in the development changelog. Has this issue been fixed in the latest AdBlockPlus? Right now I'm running without ABP (and hating life). Prior to removing the add-on, my browser would consistently creep up to over 2GB memory usage by the end of each business day. Without the add-on, I'm staying below 500M, again consistently.

[Wladimir Palant]

Yes, this issue has been fixed in Adblock Plus 1.3.6.

[Scott]

Everything was and has been ok since upgrading to ff4 2 weeks ago. Until I went to this one site (loaded with ads) today. Watching task manager it slowly blossoms until it hange (for me) around 600mb. First and only time I've had a problem. You can replicate if you wish by going to http://www.toyotanation.com. Thought this could be helpful.

Vista 32 basic
FF4, Default theme

Running extensions:
ABP 1.3.5, Brief 1.5.3, Download Status Bar 0.9.8, Tab Mix Plus 0.3.8.5, Java Console 6.0.24, Pixlr Grabber 2.1.1

[Wladimir Palant]

@Scott: The obvious question - is this related to Adblock Plus? In other words, does the problem go away if Adblock Plus is disabled? Also, does it still happen if all extensions but Adblock Plus are disabled?