Memory usage with Firefox out of control

E

Elledan

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - April 2010
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I noticed this occasionally with FF 1.0.4, that firefox.exe would be using 150+ MB of RAM, but even since 'upgrading' to 1.0.6 this issue became much worse, to the point that I had to restart FF once or twice a day simply because its memory usage impacted system performance.

I've now switched to Mozilla 1.7.10, and it appears to behave much better than FF.

From what I've read, others also have this same issue with FF (1.0.5+) and there doesn't appear to be a fix (yet).

Those using FF, are you experiencing this issue as well?
 
Well, I've been abusing Mozilla for a couple of hours, then I let it rest for an hour, and it's still using around 50 MB. Much better than FF on the same system.
 
Use Deer Park Alpha 2. It has a few memory leak fixes.

That said, the Mozilla guys openly say that RAM is there to be used, so memory usage trimming isn't their highest priority.
 
Terpfen said:
Use Deer Park Alpha 2. It has a few memory leak fixes.

That said, the Mozilla guys openly say that RAM is there to be used, so memory usage trimming isn't their highest priority.
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Mozilla is still using about 53 MB of RAM, which is fine by me. Pages also seem to load faster than with FF and things in general seem 'smoother'.

I prefer not to use Alpha software when possible, so I'll wait until the next major release of FF (in september, if I recall correctly), but thanks for the information :)
 
If you're using the release versions of FF, they still suffer from the problem of not releasing memory from when you open and close other tabs. I've had FF to a point where it'd be using about 300MB of RAM (and with 300MB dedicated to Folding, and another couple hundred to developer tools, Java and Visual Studio, that's all my RAM).

Of course, with Deer Park 1/2, the severe tab memory leak has pretty much been cleared up. But if you're not up to running alpha software, then you'll have to run Mozilla until FF 1.5 is released, which is the next major release of FF.
 
I'm using the general relase version 1.06. Upon first opening Fx, memory usage is ~20,000K. After Fx is open for anything more than 20 minutes, w/ multiple tabs, memeory usage starts to creep up; it's been as high as 110,000K. I've got plenty of memory, but I think this leak problem is a bit ridiculous.
 
Try setting the userpref browser.cache.memory.capacity in about:config. 65535 (64MB) should be plenty to both limit Firefox's memory usage, and simultaneously give it enough RAM for casual browsing.

You can also free up resources by occasionally closing and reloading FF. Get Sessionsaver, or use Tab Mix Plus' session restoration feature, if you want to go this route.
 
Terpfen said:
You can also free up resources by occasionally closing and reloading FF. Get Sessionsaver, or use Tab Mix Plus' session restoration feature, if you want to go this route.
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I just minimize it and then bring it back up. I'm at 96MB now, I just minimized it, and now I'm at 20MB.
 
Terpfen said:
Try setting the userpref browser.cache.memory.capacity in about:config. 65535 (64MB) should be plenty to both limit Firefox's memory usage, and simultaneously give it enough RAM for casual browsing.
Click to expand...
I already tried this, but it doesn't have any effect whatsoever. I've also read that this setting is no longer used in 1.0.6.

1tbs4life said:
I just minimize it and then bring it back up. I'm at 96MB now, I just minimized it, and now I'm at 20MB.
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This may seem to work, but in reality it doesn't. If you look at the total amount of memory used, when you close FF, you can see the sharp drop when FF's resources are released. When you minimize FF, however, there's no such drop, and memory usage is back to previous levels in no-time.
 
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