Bug#428754: Consume all available memory while opening an XML file

[Mike Hommey]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 05:01:48AM -0400, Simon Valiquette <v.simon at ieee.org> wrote:
> Mike Hommey un jour écrivit:
> >>
> >>  If you open this xml file with iceape (localy or from the web), iceape
> >>will start to use all available memory at over 1MB/s until It crash.
> >>
> >>http://download.wikipedia.org/images/archive/etwiktionary/20060912/etwiktionary-20060912-abstract.xml
> >>
> >>  Note that java and javascript are disabled in my browser, so you won't
> >>have to search for that.
> >>
> >>  It would be useful if someone with some free time could trim this XML
> >>file and find a minimal subset that still crash iceape.
> >
> >I would say the "minimal subset" is what is enough for the DOM
> >structures for this xml file to fill up all your memory. The crash may
> >occur because of the OOM killer.
> >
> 
>   I wasn't clear enough, but yes, It is the OOM killer that kill iceape, 
> not iceape that crash after using all available memory.
> 
>   If I have time Sunday, I will try to find the minimal subset of this 
> file that is enought to make Iceape take all the memory.
> 
>   Another possibility is that the file is just very big and the 
> intermediate processing is taking way too much memory, and that with 
> enough memory It would works (I have 512MB, which is supposed to be more 
> than enough with Blackbox).  Anyway, I will get this answer very quickly 
> while trimming parts of this XML file.

You don't need to. The answer is simple. The XML file you posted is more
than 3MB. XML files are also displayed in iceape (or iceweasel, etc.)
in a fancy way that creates even more elements in the DOM. This is the
reason why iceape needs a *lot* of memory to open an XML file.

There's not much that can be done here, unfortunately :(

Mike