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Hi everyone,

This program acts very strange once in awile. In time of active use it simply eats memory like crazy. Is it normal for OmniWeb users to start it and close after visiting few website? Most of the time I keep browser on as long as machine is up and running, with occasional reboots for the box after security upgrades from Apple. With OmniWeb I'm forced to take snapshots and re-start the program when ram usage is up to 500Mb active and 1Gb+ virtual.

My main concern is that such a hole could potentially be exploited for buffer overflow by unnamed malicious website. I can continue using Lynx+Safari combo, but many small things makes OmniWeb better potential #1 browser than Safari, if such problems will be addressed.

Best,
dustman
 
so it means this problem is very old but still not fixed? since safari is also based on khtml but doesn't have this problem, I assume it's specific to OmniWeb. Am I wrong?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by dustman
so it means this problem is very old but still not fixed? since safari is also based on khtml but doesn't have this problem, I assume it's specific to OmniWeb. Am I wrong?
Yes you are, I'm afraid ... read the other threads Forrest quoted and you'll know all about it!

Mark
 
Sorry, it helps to know Len Case is/was a dev on OW but his name is no longer in bold.

I was trying to point out that this subject gets brought up very often, but more often than not it's just a misunderstanding of how OS X manages memory. You'll see there was at least one leak in 5.5 in testing, but since then none have been found.

OW will use more memory than Safari because it has things like graphical tabs and workspaces. Unless you're finding that your free and inactive memory is hitting zero, there's probably not a problem.

For me, OW is currently using 715MB real and 1.94GB virtual. I've only got 86MB of free memory, but I have 1426 of inactive. I have 4.5GB of RAM, and for some reason I can never get it to actually use more than 3GB.
 
I must admit memory management in mac os x is not the subject I got deep knowledge of. I agree that unless you have no free/inactive memory left, it's not a real problem.

IMO, problem is that craftly designed websites can exploit this feature of OmniWeb and make your box crawl. Since I've only got 1Gb ram on my g4 1.42Ghz, it's rather problematic once in awhile. I did noticed small increase in ram usage by OW while box was idling. Nothing spectacular, just few Mb on top of couple of hundreds. I would disable url's from third sites to limit ram usage even more, but Wiki is one of my favs and uses this option alot for images.

I did read all links posted but could not find any indications on why this problem persists. Not to imply anything, but developers were aware of it for long time.

I think it's quite reasonable to compare OW to Safari due to similar underlying engine and optimization for mac os x. I might accept higher ram usage by OW vs. Safari, but it's hard to justify when this difference is more than 100%. Argument 'it's only few websites causing such problem' looks like a poor excuse to me.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by dustman
I think it's quite reasonable to compare OW to Safari due to similar underlying engine and optimization for mac os x. I might accept higher ram usage by OW vs. Safari, but it's hard to justify when this difference is more than 100%. Argument 'it's only few websites causing such problem' looks like a poor excuse to me.
I was in a rush this morning, but expected it to come out in some of the many threads on this and similar topics, that although OW and Safari both use WebKit, they use different versions of WebKit, and, as I understand it, there are issues with the version that OW uses which apparently seem not to be there with the (older) version that Safari uses.
Mark
 
Just to clarify things: As far as I know

- No, there is no known memory leak in OW at this time.
- Yes, OW uses quite a bit more memory than Safari does.

I always keep OW open, too, but i'm not a heavy surfer. After about a week OW uses about 170MB physical and aout 470MB virtual memory.

As to memory management, just to make it clear to everyone: "Free" means physical memory that is not used at all at the moment. "Inactive" memory has been claimed by some app and has not been freed yet, but also hasn't been used for some time. If any app wants to allocate memory, and the free physical memory has gone below a certain threshold, OS X will copy those inactive memory pages to the virtual mem on disk and free some physical RAM to fulfil the request.

In other words: You don't have any problems unless you don't have much space left on the volume where the swap file resides. Using virtual memory always leads to a slowdown, of course, but in my experience the memory management is rather fast (compared to Windows, e.g.) in OS X and works quite well. OW _could_ be a problem, of course, if you only have 512MB of RAM or similar.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by zottel
Just to clarify things: As far as I know

- No, there is no known memory leak in OW at this time.
- Yes, OW uses quite a bit more memory than Safari does.

I always keep OW open, too, but i'm not a heavy surfer. After about a week OW uses about 170MB physical and aout 470MB virtual memory.
Wow, that's quite incredible!
I've just opened OW. I have 4 tabs open right now, and I see 108mb/587mb usage. In a few hours, OW will be up to 300-400mb REAL memory, and 1gb+ VM!
I understand that OW will always eat more memory than Safari, but that's a bit too much, no?
 
Hm, that's really kinda strange. Since my last post, I didn't close OW. It now takes even less memory: 100MB physical and 452MB virtual mem.

But, again: I'm not a heavy surfer. There are only a few websites I frequent, and none of them use flash, Javascript is at least not used heavily, if at all.

I do go to some flash and/or ajax sites now and then, but I always close the tabs afterwards. I have five workspaces, only one of which has more than one tab (and none of which has flash, animated gifs or always moving javascript stuff).

I guess that might explain the relatively low memory footprint OW has here. But as it has even DEcreased since my last post, at least in the surroundings I use it for OW doesn't seem to have a memory leak.

I personally don't know what tests can be used to see if a memory leak is present in an app, and how accurate these tests are, but the tests the Omni people used seem to tell that there are none. Go figure. ;-)

Edit: Just to test I went to clipfish.de, a German clone of Youtube. OW now takes 110MB physical and 473MB virtual mem. That's a plus of 30MB for just one site. Closing the tab made the footprint go to 105/460MB. So: a) If you have many heavy sites like this open, it will of course take a lot of mem. b) After closing, the footprint ist still higher than it was before I opened that site. I guess that's due to some parts of the cache being kept in memory, but I'm not sure. Additionally, the flash plugin was loaded for the site, and it probably wasn't before. So the increase could be the plugin that might be discarded after some time when it's not used? I don't know. There MIGHT be a memory leak, but with my usage it doesn't really look like.

Last edited by zottel; 2007-03-23 at 06:42 PM..
 
 


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