Firefox memory management nightmare

Can you believe that you can crash any linux machine with a web page displaying stamp size images, while an iPod can display it without an glitch? Try this dead page with you browser, that displays large images resized and watch your memory usage.

WARNING: this page requires ~300Mb RAM to display!

https://pages.usherbrooke.ca/fgiraldeau/crashff/

Ok, what's going on? I did a small utility to monitor the memory usage of Firefox, and the memory usage was quite normal. Where did all this memory allocation occur? After few top, it appears that the Xorg process blew up. Here is a graph that show both process on crashff loading.

Memory consumption for crashff page loading according to time

The test shows the page loading, opening other tabs and coming back to the original page. The full scale image is transfered to the Xserver for rescaling the image. On localhost, it's fast, but when Firefox is started remotely, then all this data has to be transfered on the network! After a while, the image is flushed from Xserver, and display the tab requires doing all this work again. And because the Xserver allocates the memory, if you run out of memory, the Out Of Memory (OOM) killer of the kernel will be triggered, but it's likely to kill the Xorg process and leads to the user's session lost. This is really critical.

There is one optimization that may help this, and wanted to know the impact. When setting MOZ_DISABLE_IMAGE_OPTIMIZE to 1, it was supposed to change the behavior. Let see the same experiment with this environment value set.

Memory consumption for crashff page loading, with optimization, according to time

Ok, so we see that the Xorg process stays at some low level of memory usage, this time firefox blows up. At least, if the user hits the memory limit, then only the Firefox process gets killed, and the user's session will not crash.

I did also the test with Opera 10.60.6386 and Konqueror 4.4.2, and the result is mostly the same as with Firefox with optimization. Konqueror uses a less memory, and doesn't deallocate the tab, so when displaying it again, it's really fast. Here are the graphs.

So MOZ_DISABLE_IMAGE_OPTIMIZE does the trick, and IMHO, this option should be the default.

Note: this blog is related to this firefox bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395260