And \_another\_ two hours gone

At work, one of our visitors had a problem: his browser kept crashing whenever he visited crashing whenever he visited his university's webpage. That's what caused this problem, with the ginormous core files; Firefox would start grabbing memory at a rate of about 10-20MB/s, and then Solaris would kill it off once it got to around 2.5GB. Truss showed that it kept opening a copy of the Times Roman font over and over again, but I couldn't figure out why.

I tried duplicating it under my own account, but couldn't — so I moved my .mozilla out of the way and set up a new profile, which did have the problem. At first I figured it must be Javascript; I hate Javascript and almost always turn it off (but thanks to the NoScript plugin it's easy to toggle it for individual sites), so that must be it, right? Wrong. Okay, so what about prefs.js? Nope.

After copying over nearly all the files in my original profile, FF was still grabbing memory…until finally, out of desperation, I copied over the Flash plugin. And by the beard of Zeus, it worked!

I did some digging around (there are a truly depressing number of Mozilla bugs that mention Flash) and found mention (sorry, lost link) that some methods of detecting whether a browser has the Flash plugin can end up using all the memory available to the browser. That sounds similar enough to what I saw that I think I'm going to call that the problem-designate for now.