[Lubuntu-qa] Chromium eating memory

[Phill Whiteside]

Hi Chad,

the launchpad page that I opened [1] does not exhibit this behaviour, I
will install a new VM and try to get a set of dmesg for you. Just to keep
things fair, I'll also create an identical VM but open the same tabs with
FireFox. I should have a result by the morning (it is 22:40 here and it
takes me a little while to set up VM's) :)

Thank you for your input on this,

Phill.

1. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1084852


On 4 January 2013 19:54, Chad MILLER <chad.miller at canonical.com> wrote:

> On Thu 03 Jan 2013 06:49:47 PM EST, Phill Whiteside wrote:
> > We are seeing an issue with Chromium on low RAM systems where we get
> "It's dead Jim" issues. At first I believed this to be a Chromium memory
> leak, but it does not affect all web pages [1]. I have tried to report this
> via [2] which errorred out with 'mal formed request', trying to use the
> 'learn more' and trying to report an error in the failed window also
> resulted in the same. Even more odd (to me) was that leaving the tabs open
> ended up in them giving the "It's dead Jim" error on the tab. Just as a
> check in my own logic, I opened up a launchpad bug tab for a bug. This tab,
> over several days & resets of other tabs that had to be reset never once
> failed.
> >
> > Apologies for the long introduction. Is there anything I can add to the
> system to try and get some details for you guys to work off? gdb I have
> been intimated at, is not really suited for a memory leak; but as I don't
> think it is a memory leak and Chromium still runs with the tabs still
> 'alive' would it be of use to use gdb to trace back an PiD?
> >
> > Assuming you don't have a machine that you can pull memory chips out of,
> until you have 512Mb of RAM (The guys with these machines are the ones who
> 1st reported it)..
> >
> > 1. Create a VM with 512 Mb RAM
> > 2. Install Lubuntu (I suggest using alternate at such low RAM) [3] -
> I've also tried this with Raring
> > 3. Open a couple of tabs, e.g. BBC News [4] and a bug report [5] - Well,
> it was a chromium bug :)
> > 4. Open a couple of other tabs for sites you know to be stable -
> Remember, you are on a low-RAM system, nothing too exotic!
> > 5. Wait.
> > 6. Tabs will report "It's dead Jim".. - This may take several hours -
> Tab opened with [5] will stay working.
> >
> > Us testers are stuck to try to progress and any help you can give to
> help log the bug correctly in order that it can be progressed is needed.
> I've tried installing the dev chromium instead of the 'new' chromium in the
> repos, the effect is the same.
>
>
> Hi Phill, all.
>
> I assume it's the out-of-memory process reaper in the kernel, at work
> here killing process that backs the tab you see.  Can you confirm
> something interesting in "dmesg" output?
>
> I can imagine that a lazily-written web site can have Javascript code
> that ever grows its memory usage.  I'm keen to know whether the same
> machine can reproduce this crash on a mundane web site that doesn't
> have JS events firing off RPC calls and/or updating the DOM.  If it
> does crash anyway, this gets interesting.
>
> Answering those two questions would help me categorize this bug-report
> pretty easily.  Let's open a normal bug on Launchpad to track this for
> now.
>
> - chad
>
>


-- 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/phillw
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