My single-page web application runs into a memory leak situation with Chromium on Linux. My app fetches html markup and embeds it into the main page via .innerHTML. The remote html snippets may reference jpgs or pngs. The memory leak does not occur in JS-heap. This can be seen in the table below.
Column A shows the size of the JS-heap as reported by performance.memory.usedJSHeapSize. (I am running Chromium with -enable-precise-memory-info parameter to get precise values.)
Column B shows the total amount of memory occupied by Chromium as shown by top (only start and end values sampled).
Column C shows the amount of "available memory" in Linux as reported by /proc/meminfo.
A B C
01 1337628 234.5 MB 522964 KB
02 1372198 499404 KB
03 1500304 499864 KB
04 1568540 485476 KB
05 1651320 478048 KB
06 1718846 489684 KB GC
07 1300169 450240 KB
08 1394914 475624 KB
09 1462320 472540 KB
10 1516964 471064 KB
11 1644589 459604 KB GC
12 1287521 441532 KB
13 1446901 449220 KB
14 1580417 436504 KB
15 1690518 457488 KB
16 1772467 444216 KB GC
17 1261924 418896 KB
18 1329657 439252 KB
19 1403951 436028 KB
20 1498403 434292 KB
21 1607942 429272 KB GC
22 1298138 403828 KB
23 1402844 412368 KB
24 1498350 412560 KB
25 1570854 409912 KB
26 1639122 419268 KB
27 1715667 399460 KB GC
28 1327934 379188 KB
29 1438188 417764 KB
30 1499364 401160 KB
31 1646557 406020 KB
32 1720947 402000 KB GC
33 1369626 283.3 MB 378324 KB
While the JS-heap only alters between 1.3 MB and 1.8 MB during my 33-step test, Chromium memory (as reported by top) grows by 48.8 MB (from 234.5 MB to 283.3 MB). And according to /proc/meminfo the "available memory" is even shrinking by 145 MB (from 522964 KB to 378324 KB in column C) at the same time. I assume Chromium is occupying some good amount of cache memory outside of the reported 283.3 MB. Note that I am invoking GC manually 6 times via developer tools.
Before running the test, I have stopped all unnecessary services and killed all unneeded processes. No other code is doing any essential work in parallel. There are no browser extensions and no other open tabs.
The memory leak appears to be in native memory and probably involves the images being shown. They are never being freed, it seems. This issue appears to be similar to 1 (bugs.webkit.org). I have applied all the usual suggestions as listed here 2. If I keep the app running, the amount of memory occupied by Chromium will grow unbound up until everything comes to a crawl or until the Linux OOM killer strikes. The one thing I can do (before it is too late) is to switch the browser to a different URL. This will releases all native memory and I can then return to my app and continue with a completely fresh memory situation. But this is not a real solution.
Q: Can the native memory caches be freed in a more programatic way?
