Comments on: Firefox memory leak detection tool

By: Matt Nordhoff

Matt Nordhoff — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 05:07:44 +0000

Nightly Tester Tools 0.8b1 (will that HTML work?) now supports analyzing the leak log. So you won’t need Perl or leak-guage.pl, but you still will need to start Firefox with those environment variables.

MTCMonkey: In my experience, the critical mass seems to be when the memory cache is forced to go over the limit you set. After that, Firefox will just almost stop throwing things out of the memory cache for me.

By: Jacob Klein

Jacob Klein — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 07:43:30 +0000

The easiest way to make a one-click startup without seeing the “batch execution window” is to do the following:

- Create a shortcut to the .bat file
- Edit the shortcut’s properties to:
- Run: Minimized

By: Jacob Klein

Jacob Klein — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 07:39:30 +0000

I also created a batch (.bat) file that will work for Windows. It works under the following assumptions:

- Firefox is installed in “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox”
- Perl is installed
- The perl script “leak-guage.pl” is stored in the Firefox directory

After a browsing session, it’ll bring up notepad with the leakage info. If you then wanted to save that information to somewhere else, do it, else, don’t.

Here is the batch file:
————————-

@echo off
set NSPR_LOG_MODULES=DOMLeak:5,DocumentLeak:5,nsDocShellLeak:5
set NSPR_LOG_FILE=C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/nspr.log
start “Firefox” /wait “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe”
type “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\nspr.log” | perl “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\leak-guage.pl” > “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\nspr_leaks.log”
start “Leaks” “C:\Windows\notepad.exe” “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\nspr_leaks.log”
@echo on

By: Jesse Ruderman

Jesse Ruderman — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 20:13:28 +0000

creeront, Firefox developers do have more sophisticated tools than leak-gauge (I don’t know if they use purify in particular). Those tools don’t tell the developers if there’s a leak that doesn’t occur with the developer’s usage patterns / favorite sites / extensions. Those tools also don’t tell developers which leaks actually cause users the most pain, which can help prioritize leak fixing. It’s easier to get dozens of testers to use something like leak-gauge than it is to get dozens of testers to use something like purify :)

By: creeront

creeront — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 19:17:53 +0000

Why does purify not work for the developers of firefox?

By: meneame.net

meneame.net — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 18:16:57 +0000

Memory leak detection tool for Firefox., help to get rid of leaks!…

“David Baron recently wrote a tool that testers can use to help reduce memory leaks in Firefox. With this tool, you can find out what leaks you encounter during your normal browsing patterns and report useful bugs when you encounter leaks.”…