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Firefox Memory consumption

Some big memory leaks in the add-on SDK are getting fixed

I know almost nothing about the add-on SDK, so please see bug 607601 for details.  Bug 642306, bug 646575 and bug 649334 are similar and hopefully will also be fixed soon too.  Great work by Alexandre Poirot!

(And if anyone who does know about the add-on SDK can explain a bit more about these leaks and which add-ons are affected, I’d love you to do so in the comments.  Thanks!)

3 replies on “Some big memory leaks in the add-on SDK are getting fixed”

The first bug 607601 concern absolutely all addons using page-mod module.
Bug 642306 is for addons using page-worker API with a lot of documents.
Bug 646575 is a platform bug, so it concerns all addons (not only jetpack ones) that use Sandbox (like greasemonkey for ex). The leak is not big but when you are creating a lot of sandboxes, like addon SDK or greasemonkey, it can be problematic.
Bug 649334 is triggered by almost all addon built with the SDK.

So my advice is: rebuild your addon when SDK 1.0b5 is released (early May)!

Alexandre: thanks for the info! What do the page-mode and page-worker APIs do? Do any of the most popular add-ons use them?

Also, I wonder how many more leaks are lurking in the SDK. Do you have any plans to look for more, either by code review or measurements? Seems like it would be worthwhile.

Finally, regarding your “rebuild your addon” advice — will these improvements be widely publicized to add-on authors? It would be a real shame if these leaks remained unnecessarily in some add-ons.

If you want the performance now, rebuild it for sure, but within the next month or two AMO will be rebuilding all your jetpacks automatically when the new SDKs ship so don’t stress out about it too much.

And yeah, the more holes like this we can plug the better. Jetpack perf leaves a bit to be desired.

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