Bug 116706 – QTwebkit memory consumption

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: INVALID
• Component: WebKit Qt

We fave developed a webbrowser on top of QT for an embedded linux platform. There is 256MB available to the linux kernel, on startup there's almost 140MB free but as you load different URIs into the browser, the memory keeps growing until wraps all the available memory. Then the oom killer usually kills the process or the system must be reboot.

We have made a minimum webbrowser which loads continuosly the same webpage:

#include <QWebView>
#include <QtGui>

class Loader : public QObject {
    Q_OBJECT
public:
    Loader(QWebView* view, const QUrl& url) : m_view(view), m_url(url) {}

public slots:
    void loadNext()
    {
        m_view->load(m_url);
    }

private:
    QWebView* m_view;
    QUrl m_url;
};

#include "main.moc"

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    QApplication application(argc, argv);
    QWebView view;
    QUrl url("http://www.webkit.org");
    Loader loader(&view, url);
    QObject::connect(&view, SIGNAL(loadFinished(bool)), &loader,
SLOT(loadNext()));
    view.load(url);
    view.show();

    return application.exec();
}

This have been tested with:

- Qt versions : 4.7.2 / 4.8.1 /4.8.4
- Platforms : x86 / mipsel

The process used memory increments itself per interation in amounts of ~4KB.

I have seen several issues like this reported and throughout the internet even from years ago, but I wasn't able to find a solution. So our browser, that is ment to be used in a long run app ( IPTV middleware ) is useless right now.

[Felix Schindler]

We have the same problem here. After a few hours of loadind random sites the memory consumption increased by 360 MByte. Even after deleting the QWebView the memory is not freed. Accoring to our memory leaks detector about 70 MByte are real memory leaks. The rest is only freed on the termination of the program. 

I'm totally clueless about how to deal with this problem.

We have these issues with Qt 4.7.3 and Qt 4.8.4.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

The Qt port has been removed from WebKit, resolving.