Animated webP image causes huge RAM usage

[jamess]

Hi,

When playing animated webP images (or precisely, short video clips), Pale Moon's RAM usage becomes extremely high. Opening a ~20 MB webP file (for example, this sample file created by the Video Thumbnails Maker) can use over 4 GB of RAM, and hence usually gets Pale Moon killed because of OOM. I also noticed that even if I close the browser immediately after opening the webP, the process won't exit right away. Instead, it takes half a minute for the RAM usage to grow linearly from ~200 MB to over 4 GB and only after that the process terminates.

I am running Pale Moon 28.10.0 (64-bit) Build ID: 20200604221856 on Windows 7, but I can reproduce the issue on Windows 10 as well.

[Moonchild]

Using animated WebP images for video has the same drawbacks as using animated GIFs for video. They are image formats, not video formats. They aren't designed for video and shouldn't be used for video representation because they aren't streaming formats.
For the discussion about animated gif memory usage when abused and resulting OOM see viewtopic.php?f=29&t=24497

Bottom line: don't use animated WebP for this. Use WebM which is designed for video.

[jamess]

For the discussion about animated gif memory usage when abused and resulting OOM see viewtopic.php?f=29&t=24497

Thanks for the pointer. I haven't noticed OOM caused by huge GIF, but I see how they are similarly handled.

Bottom line: don't use animated WebP for this. Use WebM which is designed for video.

Fair enough, I don't like huge animated webP either, so I have image.animation_mode set to "none". But that doesn't stop the frames from being decoded, and hence still causes huge RAM usage despite being unnecessary.