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about:memory B2G DMD Fennec Firefox Memory consumption MemShrink

MemShrink progress, week 79–82

I skipped the last MemShrink report due to Christmas, so we have four weeks’ worth of bug fixes today.

LEAKS

Joe Walker fixed a bad leak found by Jesse Ruderman:  if you closed a browser window with the developer toolbar open it would leak “everything”.  This was a MemShrink P1 bug.

Anton Kovalyov fixed a leak involving scratchpad.  This bug was also found by Jesse Ruderman.

Randell Jesup fixed some WebRTC leaks.

John Schoenick fixed a leak involving plugins.

Josh Aas fixed a leak in some networking code.

DMD

I wrote a more detailed blog post about DMD.  Here is the take-away message.

about:memory is MemShrink’s not-so-secret weapon when it comes to understanding Firefox’s memory consumption… and DMD is how we make about:memory better.

Lots of under-the-hood improvements have been made to DMD since I wrote that.  Users on Mac, Linux and B2G who aren’t afraid of doing their own builds should try it out.  Also, Ehsan Akhgari got it to build on Windows, though it’s not yet clear how well it works on that platform.  If anyone wants to try it out, please let me know how it goes.

Memory Reporters

Ben Turner made the workers memory reporter be able to handle workers that use ctypes.  This was important, especially on B2G, because each process can have one or two or more such workers — this is for Firefox chrome stuff, not web content — and we weren’t measuring them at all, and they can take multiple MiB each.

I fixed the orphan DOM node memory reporter.  The introduction of WebIDL had changed the layout of some paired JS/DOM objects, and such objects weren’t being reported.  (DMD discovered the unreported memory, and Boris Zbarsky helped me interpret what it meant.)  I see this accounting for multiple MiB of orphan nodes when using Gmail.

I added a memory reporter for the event listenener manager’s hash table.  It starts off small, but I’ve seen it go as high as 1.5 MiB after lots of browsing.  (DMD helped me identify this too.)

Kartikaya Gupta added a memory reporter for graphics textures on Android.

I added a memory reporter for any ctypes data that is hanging off JS objects.  I added it because one DMD profile on B2G showed non-trivial amounts of ctypes data, but that seems to have been a fluke and it rarely shows much memory now.  Oh well.

Miscellaneous

Andrew McCreight improved CC shutdown logging, which will make it easier to identify shutdown leaks.

Rail Aliiev and Kartikaya Gupta enabled a new NDK for Fennec builds on releng machines.  This might result in smaller binary sizes, which saves memory.

Bug Counts

Here are the current bug counts.

  • P1: 15 (-2/+0)
  • P2: 116 (-10/+0)
  • P3: 102 (-4/+0)
  • Unprioritized: 18 (-0/+18)

The number of unprioritized bugs is high because we didn’t have a MemShrink meeting this week.  This was because Justin Lebar and Kyle Huey are in Berlin for the B2G work week.  We’ll have our next meeting two weeks from today.

7 replies on “MemShrink progress, week 79–82”

Any news about the Memory regression showing up on AWSY that was now uplifted to aurora?

Hi Nicholas,

Will desktop FF be getting some focus once B2G is released?

Seems like its on the backburner at the moment.

Thanks!

It’s likely that some of the people working on B2G will spend more time working on desktop, yes. But plenty of people are still working on desktop even while the B2G work is going on. Mozilla has several hundred employees and lots of volunteers, which means that more than one thing can be worked on at a time.

No ETA that I know of. But I’ll write about it when it’s finished.

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