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When a named window is closed by using the red traffic light button it is by all measures suspended, but the processes for its tabs are sometimes left hanging.

In the above example, Window 1 and Window 2 are two open windows, with Window 2 having a reddit tab open. As shown in the video, when the window is quit with the traffic light button the first the, the process for www.reddit.com stays in the activity monitor. On opening the window again, reddit is reloaded (indicating it should have been suspended and its process killed) and a second www.reddit.com process appears. However this time on quitting with the red light button, the 2nd process disappears along with the window. The first process remains till Orion is quit. This issue doesn't occur when suspending the window or using the Close Window option.

The processes should be killed when a window is quit using the red light button, as the window itself seems to be suspended.

Version 0.99.128.2.1-beta (WebKit 619.1.11.111.2)

Sonoma (14)

    2 months later

    I think this issue with zombie processes is broader than simply clicking on the traffic lights. I came here to report this issue anew, but reading this experience leads me to suspect that, under the hood, sometimes tabs simply don't relinquish their resources once they've been closed, regardless of method – traffic light or shortcut key. I'll leave my report here instead. See below.

    Issue: Closing Tabs (using shortcut key Cmd+W) Leaves Zombie Processes

    Expected result: The tab and associated process (in Activity Monitor) should disappear.
    Actual result: The tab process remains active (in Activity Monitor). There is no eventual clean up – these processes remain open indefinitely.)

    3 months later

    Findings from a clean install in a VM - Orion 0.99.130.3-rc.

    1) A minimum test case of "open Orion, open 2 tabs, close the window" does not appear to leak any tab processes.
    2) There appears to be some retention of browser processes that map to a tab's "backstack":

    • If you open a new window, starting on a blank tab, then you click on one of your favorites, you will see that orion://newtab stays open as a process, while your new tab is also open (say orionfeedback.org)
    • From there, if you click the documentation link at the top, you will have 3 processes open - orionfeedback.org, orion://newtab, and help.kagi.com.
    • Click the github link at the top right, and you will end up at the Kagi docs git repo. You now have a github.com process, as well as the other 3.
    • Scroll to the bottom of the Github page and click status. You will end up on githubstatus.com. Now you will see the orion://newtab process has been GC'd - it's gone. So it seems that up to 4 tab domain processes stay open "per tab". Each new link you take will clear 1 of those older processes in a first-in-first-out method.

    3) Closing a tab seems to correctly end the "backstack" processes, of up to 4 processes that might still be open.

    Now, to look at this specific issue, with that background context tested.

    1) Creating a new window, starting a few new tabs, and opening 3 sites from favorites results in 3x orion://newtab processes, and then 1 process for each domain opened. I opened 3 different domains for this experiment.

    2) If you then open a new window, and close the saved window via the traffic light red button, the processes remain. I think this is to do with the paradigm of saved tabs vs windows (which I must admit I do not find intuitive, and will not explore further, as I don't understand the intent of the feature!) - this is how you can "switch" windows via the saved tabs UI, and your window disappears... I think... maybe...???

    3) If you have only 1x Orion window open (the saved window), and close it, the tab processes are killed (as people seem to expect). It seems therefore that tab processes are not "GC'd" in the event that there is another open Orion window. Which I suspect is an "expected" behaviour, based on the "saved window" switcher feature.

    4) If you look at the saved window dropdown, a window can be in 2 states - the icon might be purple (to indicate active) or grey (to indicate suspended). If you click the three-dot menu on a saved window, you can pick "suspend". That suspends all the tabs in that saved window.

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