Ah For the Days When These Weren't Part of Web Development
Wednesday, March 01, 2006, at 06:37PM
By Eric Richardson
I mentioned a few weeks back that I had made some JS code that crashed Firefox on Linux. If you're on Linux you can actually see this live now. Just go to the new Downtown L.A. Interactive Map, click on "Select a Search Type" and select "Residential Buildings". That'll pop up an interface to refine a residential search. When you select something under Type it loads some more options in under Price. Firefox 1.5 on Linux instead just bombs.
On a different site I'm working on (this one's a personal project, not a work thing) I've apparently made some javascript that creates a memory leak under that same Firefox on Linux.
As I sit reloading the page I can watch the memory usage for X (not the firefox binary... X) grow by about 5MB per reload. If I don't pay attention (easy to do when you're coding/debugging javascript) it'll eventually run the box out of mem and thrash until the OOM killer picks something off. When Firefox is killed the memory usage goes right back down, but not until. Other sites don't seem to exhibit the same effect. I'll have to check on OS X tomorrow and see if this is a Linux specific issue or something more general.