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Tag: memory leaks

  • Firefox 15 Will Finally Fix Memory Leaks Caused By Add-Ons

    Firefox 14 just came out earlier this week and brought some pretty neat stuff with it. At the time, I didn’t think that Firefox 15 would bring anything too groundbreaking to the digital table. I was wrong.

    One of the major problems with current builds of Firefox is that some add-ons can cause massive memory leaks that forces the browser to consume a lot of memory. This slows down your computer which slows down your browser and then you switch to Chrome because you’ve had enough. The team at Mozilla is going to fix that problem in Firefox 15.

    You may be familiar with the MemShrink project that has sought to address the issue of older apps leaking memory let and right. That project is going to be integrated into Firefox starting with Firefox 15 according to Mozilla engineer Nicholas Nethercote. The change should make Firefox 15 faster and less likely to crash.

    It’s good news for Firefox users because Mozilla has found that a lot of the most popular add-ons for Firefox have suffered from memory leak problems in the past. Popular add-ons like Adblock Plus and GreaseMonkey suffer from the problem. Nethercoote points out that the developers have fixed these leaks in the apps, but not all apps have been fixed. That’s what this patch in Firefox 15 is developed for – to fix the leaks when developers can’t.

    So what kind of benefits can we hope to expect with the release of Firefox 15? Nethercote did a test of Firefox 14 and 15 coupled with a known leaky add-on and then ran MemBench, a memory benchmark tool. The difference between the two is pretty drastic:

    Firefox 15 Will Finally Fix Memory Leaks Caused By Add-Ons

    As you can see, Firefox 15 is much better at handling memory and preventing memory leaks caused by add-ons. It should be going into beta soon now that Firefox 14 is out, so look forward to it then to start getting a faster Firefox experience. If you can’t wait, you can grab the Aurora release which contains the fix.

  • Firefox Memory Leaks Somewhat Fixed With Patch

    If you’re like me, you use a lot of add-ons with your Firefox build. They help make the Web a better, brighter place. Unfortunately, these add-ons occasionally cause memory leaks which can bog down Firefox and generally make the browser slower.

    Fortunately for us, Nicholas Nethercote, a Firefox team member, turned us on to a patch from Kyle Huey that should fix the problem. It prevents what’s called an “add-on zombie compartment” which saves a ton of memory in the long run. During Nethercorte’s tests, he found that the patch not only fixed the problem, but sped up Firefox with a four times reduction in memory.

    The patch should effectively make Firefox faster in slower machine and stop pauses in Firefox on higher end machines. The latter would definitely help me out as I’ve run into long pauses in the past that completely cripple all the momentum I’ve built up while working.

    Unfortunately, it appears that the patch is not all inclusive. Add-ons built using older versions of the Firefox add-on SDK are immune to the effects of the patch. They still cause all kinds of nasty memory leaks. In fact, the patch made them leak even more making the problem much worse. Nethercote says the problem could be widespread because a lot of add-ons were built using the old SDK.

    The only solution the team can think of is to encourage add-on creators to rebuild their apps using the new version of the add-on SDK which you can find here.

    This couldn’t be made at a better time with Mozilla recently detailing all of its release channels. It’s these kind of problems that they need developer help with on the Nightly builds. Using the patch and the new version of the add-on SDK are a quick fix for now, but testing out new features in Nightly are the only sure fire way to permanently fix these kind of problems from happening again. If you have Nigthly, Nethercorte wants developers to monitor about:compartments to see if add-ons are causing more leaks.

    [h/t: @mattcutts]