[AEGM9X]

Originally Posted by Len Case

Not that this is recent, but I thought I should let you know that we did find and fix one leak in sp6 that was leaking memory on every page load.

Of course, that was when we introduced the crasher that caused us to release sp7 right away. :eek:

There is also a definite leak in SP7, and a very serious one that stops the clock and hangs the whole system, needing a flick of the power switch.

If you want to find leaks then try using 512Mb memory, dial-up, and watch the small TV ads here: http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/ while at the same time browsing other pages. Then move the slider on the movie back to the beginning, works every time.

For reliability it's important to test using the standard memory configurations Apple ship most of their kit with.

[Mad Hatter]

Buy more memory? How much do you have? I would guess that 1.5GB should be pretty normal for most use. Definitely more than the "minimums" of 512MB or so. And more for G5s even than G4 systems (no idea what MacIntel but suspect that Rosetta likes to have plenty!).

I have 1.75GB and almost never see more than one swap file - for some reason installing one piece of software created a couple on another system with only 1GB - I keep a window on the desktop to /private/var/vm when I want to know.

You might want to boot into Single User Mode and check your disk if it got too full, then, if you have Applejack, run that and remove all the cache folders and swap files - best way I know - as well as backup and make more room or get a new drive.

[AEGM9X]

Originally Posted by Mad Hatter

Buy more memory? How much do you have? I would guess that 1.5GB should be pretty normal for most use. Definitely more than the "minimums" of 512MB or so. And more for G5s even than G4 systems (no idea what MacIntel but suspect that Rosetta likes to have plenty!).

I have 1.75GB and almost never see more than one swap file - for some reason installing one piece of software created a couple on another system with only 1GB - I keep a window on the desktop to /private/var/vm when I want to know.

You might want to boot into Single User Mode and check your disk if it got too full, then, if you have Applejack, run that and remove all the cache folders and swap files - best way I know - as well as backup and make more room or get a new drive.

Thanks for volunteering some help, but I don't need any as I was working with UNIX when AT&T still owed it ;)

I would rather Omni searched for (and cured) the cause, than users suggest how to put up with the symptoms.

NB: I deliberately have CRASHREPORTER=-NO- in /etc/hostconfig and kern.coredump=0 in /etc/sysctl.conf

I have this from a JavaNativeCrash log with the example described earlier:

java_command: <unknown>
Unknown Signal (13): SIG_IGN, sa_mask[0]=0x00000000, sa_flags=0x00000002
Unknown Signal (30): [OmniCrashCatcher+0x1fb0], sa_mask[0]=0x00000000, sa_flags=0x00000040
Unknown Signal (31): SIG_DFL, sa_mask[0]=0x00000000, sa_flags=0x00000002
Unknown Signal (1): [libjvm.dylib+0x2866a4], sa_mask[0]=0xfffefeff, sa_flags=0x00000002
Unknown Signal (2): [libjvm.dylib+0x2866a4], sa_mask[0]=0xfffefeff, sa_flags=0x00000002
Unknown Signal (3): [libjvm.dylib+0x2866a4], sa_mask[0]=0xfffefeff, sa_flags=0x00000002
Unknown Signal (15): [libjvm.dylib+0x2866a4], sa_mask[0]=0xfffefeff, sa_flags=0x00000002

As I write SP7 has just crashed again, spontaneously:

Process: OmniWeb (5.5 sneaky peek 7 (v578) (Apr 27 2006))
exception = 0x00000001, code = 0x00000001;0x10965000;

This time I have an OmniCrash report to send in :) what fun.

From a commercial point of view any requirement to have N Gb of memory for a browser is going to be a barrier to sales. If this product wants to sell to the largest possible number of Mac users then it needs to manage to run within the system requirements of the OS (which are more than sufficient to support a browser).

For those with low memory systems that like to see their browser fail, here's another candidate http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

Once again, my advice to Omni is for QA to test on low end Macs as shipped.

[Mad Hatter]

Just because you and I are probably in our 60's doesn't mean we don't need help sometimes ;) (and I am old enough to have seen disk drums connected to PDP-8).

however, pulling the plug is a sure way to end up with a corrupt filesystem.

I spent the am and watched memory. 200MB while surfing through hundreds of photos (most small, none were huge) but as soon as I opened some tabs, probably 60 from one bookmark folder, memory started climbing quite a bit so sure seems like tabs are spawning their own memory cache.

Even a well behaved server can ultimately need to have a reboot to reclaim memory. Even a B2.

However, 5.1.3 is not very good at threading or opening those same 60 tabs and many would time out or fail and OW had begun to feel sluggish and slow compared to the latest Firefox 1.5.x.

A lot of small problems can be helped (and cured) with fsck and Applejack. I hope you use both after pulling the plug. Something I've never needed or had to do.

[Cortig]

Originally Posted by Mad Hatter

Buy more memory? How much do you have? I would guess that 1.5GB should be pretty normal for most use. Definitely more than the "minimums" of 512MB or so. And more for G5s even than G4 systems (no idea what MacIntel but suspect that Rosetta likes to have plenty!).

I have 1.75GB and almost never see more than one swap file

I really don't think it is related. I have 1.5GB on my PowerBook and 2GB on the G5 at work. I was seeing huge swap files even though I had nothing open except for OW (and a few background processes that had never eaten so much memory).
I reported that really because I suspected OW was the main cause of the generation of these swapfiles. I should have checked the pageouts more carefully though. That's also something I never saw with the 5.1.x versions.

The generation of the swap files really depend on what apps you use and how much RAM they require. You say you never see more than one swap file with 1.75GB of RAM and I guess you are lucky. I just checked on my Mac and with all the apps I have open, I have 1GB worth of swap files despite the 2GB of RAM (but this time I have a fair number of apps open). The problem is also that Tiger is really bad at releasing swap files (for some reason, 10.3 was much better at it - they must ahve their reasons), so that's also to be taken in consideration... Difficult issue to assess.

With OW 5.5sp7, I haven't yet seen the boot volume eaten up with swap files. It looks like this problem is much better under control now :)

[bethkatz17582]

I decided to slip into the slow lane and installed sp7 on my kids' machine. It's a 400 MHz blue-and-white G3 with 640MB of memory running OS X 10.4.6. I don't have a "minimal" memory machine. Yes, it felt very slow, but it was doing okay (even with loading that Million Dollar Home Page). I tried to use up all the memory using other apps as well (Safari, iPhoto, Enigmo). OW hung out with about 100MB of real memory. Yes, it would be nice if that were a smaller footprint, but things were happening.

I wandered around trying to load pages and eventually got to a page where Activity Monitor showed OW going in and out of responding. But now I see that the "page" I was trying to load was a PDF that did eventually display on the page:
http://www.nso.edu/general/observe/sched/dst_may06.pdf

There may be something funky in that file because it's taking a while to display it in Preview or the Finder's inspector panel on my dual 1.2 GHz G4. On my G4, I download PDFs to the desktop, so I'm not sure if this is a bug only on slower machines or with the PDF in-browser rendering.

I never managed to get OW on my G3 completely back from trying to display that document. I ended up Force Quitting after taking various samples and pictures.

But I'm one data point for using OW5.5sp7 on a lower end much older Mac. I'm not saying there isn't a memory leak, but it is usable and the Million Dollar Home Page didn't immediately crash it or soak up enormous amounts of memory. It stayed up longer than Firefox seems to on that machine. So maybe something else is happening in your system.

[AEGM9X]

@Mad Hatter, nearer to 60 than 21 :) fsck is not always required, though I do from time to time.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

@Cortig At the moment I'm sitting with just one 64Mb swap file, but I've seen up to 4, 2 * 64Mb and 2 * 128Mb. Nothing really.

@bethkatz17582 The only flaky thing I'm aware of on my system these days is OW ;)

The milliondollar home page will also display for me with SP7 and 10.4.6, but it wouldn't do it with 5.1.3 beta 1 and 10.3.9, by comparison, Safari had no problem on either OS.

I'm not too bothered about having too wait due to a little paging.

I'm here using SP7 as a a last resort! having become fed up with the growing frequency of OW 5.1.3 bailing out, or needing to be force quit; it was worse under 10.3.9 than 10.4.6.

The bottom line is that OW needs to be more memory efficient, and Memory efficiency and leaks must take precedence over any and all other development. I suspect that little testing has been done under heavy paging conditions, because I suspect the Omni people all have high spec kit.

[bethkatz17582]

Ah, I thought you were saying that the million dollar home page crashed consistently in sp7 on memory bound machines. I had a counter-example. As far as I'm concerned, OW5.1.3 is old news.

[AEGM9X]

As you found, for all the memory OW takes, and all that you had left, you still had to force quit it ;)

It's http://apple.com/getamac/ads/ that consistently crashes SP7 :) I can now say that it will do this while there is no paging going on, and no use of the swap, and while there is still plenty shared memory. If I'm lucky, and it doesn't trash the native java, then I can report the crash and force quit, but the memory that was consumed by OW is not released back into the pool, obviously, that can only happen so many times. Don't worry, I'm supplying the necessary feedback by email :D

This is a fresh install of 10.4.6 (not done as an upgrade) with 512Mb memory. There are no reported fsck problems, no problems reported by disk util (not even a permissions problem), and no other instabilities from any other applications. I can trigger it even if OW is the only application I launch. I'm running bind, that is, I have my own DNS configured, as well as having made numerous networking kernel parameter changes, otherwise, it's largely bulk std. Also, Quicktime is Pro 7.0.4 (I mention this since the ads are movies).

For me 5.5 SP7 is better than 5.1.3 because it supports layers and allows me to edit Apple Groups.

In terms of stability, and memory footprint, I see no improvement, and those things have now got to be a priority.

[JKT]

I disagree completely - the memory footprint of OmniWeb 5.5 sp7 is massively improved over 5.1.x. It might still be too big, but in terms of the no. of swapfiles I would generate using 5.1.x and earlier, there is no comparison.

My main problem with sp7 isn't memory usage but CPU usage. I am conistently running into an issue where it bottoms out at 30 to 40% CPU even though it is "idle". One workspace in particular seems to trigger this and from the samples I have sent to OmniGroup it appears to me to be Javascript related, but no guarantees on that. Once it is triggered, the performance of text input is really bad (like just now, for instance). Quitting and re-launching clears it for a while, but it isn't memory usage related as far as I can tell.