Zotero appears to leak Memory when capturing pages in Ubuntu

smacfarl
I am seeing about a 3-4 mg memory loss per page captured, when using the Create New Item from Current page option. Even after the captured tab is closed this memory is never returned. I have been noticing strange behavior after heavy zotero capture use on my low memory system.

Please make sure Zotero purges all used memory, and forces Firefox to do so after every completed capture. You may observe this by running the system monitor simultaneously with zotero and watching the numbers go up on every page capture.

As a side note, Any chance you could port Zotero to Opera or the Chrome? They are much faster and much much better with resource usage.
  • adamsmith
    the last question has been asked a lot (if you look through threads you can find a more extensive answer but:), the short answer is a definite no. Zotero relies heavily on the FF infrastructure.
  • smacfarl
    So this is not a very good excuse. Yes Firefox has it's own memory manager. But there are ways of forcing garbage collection and purging. Given that Zotero is one of the most important add-ons to firefox, and a Scrapbook replacement, it behooves the Zotero team to call up the firefox team and solve this.

    Memory leaks are a beta issue, not a 1.0 version issue.

    Was this add-on stress tested? I would start there.
  • egh
    Adam was responding to your question about whether Zotero could be ported to Chrome or Opera.

    For the record, I do not see this problem with memory in Zotero 1.0.9 +

    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008121622 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.5
  • adamsmith
    thanks, yes, that's what I meant.
    like egh I cannot reproduce the memory leak (I have the same system he has), include systems specs on bug reports/troubleshooting requests.

    (and, since I'm in no way associated with Zotero I'll take the liberty to point out that this is a free (as in both speech and beer) piece of software and it would "behoove" you, smacfari, to moderate your language. If you look around here, you'll note that the developers, especially Dan, are incredibly active and helpful in the forum, more than I have seen for any commercial software. I hope it stays that way and I think we can do our part in that by communicating with them in the respectful and friendly tone they deserve).
  • smacfarl
    adam.smith,

    Developers who need to be coddled are developers who have too much personal identity at stake in their work. Yeah it's great that's it's free. But if it doesn't work it's not so great. I'm glad you feel like you need to protect the egos of people who work hard, but the reality is that firefox and friends need to get better in the places in which they suck if they don't want to be an also ran. Firefox's extension model is very lousy, which is why Google is holding off on implementing their version of it. Working vigorously to identify where that model doesn't work is only for the good of everybody.

    My advice is not just as a Zotero user but as a long time developer of software. I am more than willing to lend my time to help solving the problem. Last century we used to call this free bug testing. To be useful I need a test environment or documentation on how to set one up.

    At this point Zotero does not even save web pages to the library anymore. Perhaps the sql-lite db is not working correctly anymore? There are a million things that could be causing problems.

    I was hoping my report would generate some feedback on how to fix the problem without me first having to become a Zotero developer. Maybe this was niave.
  • smacfarl
    Here are two errors I get from Zotero when clicking on "Zotero" in the bottom right of the browser. From the Firefox console.

    Error: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80520015 (NS_ERROR_FILE_ACCESS_DENIED) [mozIStorageConnection.executeSimpleSQL]" nsresult: "0x80520015 (NS_ERROR_FILE_ACCESS_DENIED)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/db.js :: anonymous :: line 732" data: no]
    Source File: chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/db.js
    Line: 740

    Error: [Exception... "'[Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80520015 (NS_ERROR_FILE_ACCESS_DENIED) [mozIStorageStatement.execute]" nsresult: "0x80520015 (NS_ERROR_FILE_ACCESS_DENIED)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/db.js :: anonymous :: line 101" data: no] [QUERY: REPLACE INTO version (schema,version) VALUES (?,?)] [ERROR: unable to open database file]' when calling method: [nsIDOMEventListener::handleEvent]" nsresult: "0x8057001e (NS_ERROR_XPC_JS_THREW_STRING)" location: "<unknown>" data: no]
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