Firefox Memory Usage

fwor

In my experience, usage will just keep going up. A while ago I had this problem, and overnight it would consume all available memory (1Gb) and then eat my swap area (another Gb), so by morning it would be thrashing my HDD a treat.

At the time I ignored the criticism that I got here ("don't leave your PC on overnight", !!!!!!) and installed Swiftfox instead. It worked, but it's a Linux-only solution.

When I did a complete re-install of Ubuntu 9.04 the problem went away, so the root cause is still a mystery to me... But when it works properly, it's still an excellent browser IMO.

Strider590

Firefox has a well known bug, flash advertisements cause a memory leak in Firefox, it's been a problem for a very, very long time.
Hence why I use the Adblock Plus addon.

Iconic

I am using Opera and it's showing 42000.

Isn't the CPU figure more relevant?

Strider590

If an application starts to use too much memory, then windows is forced to start using the swap/page file (which is like virtual RAM) on your hard drive.

Hard drive access times are MUCH slower than RAM access times, and everything comes to a grinding halt.

So essentially processor usage does matter, but memory usage is the biggest problem.

OneADay

More sites tabs you open, more plugins you have - the more the memory usage - its a small price compared to the ability to do what you want on the net with a browser like firefox. And with 2gig of memory in PC - I have enough :-)
My actual cpu usage with firefox running is usually pretty darn low. So if memory is a problem for you - buy some new cheap chips.

kwikbreaks

I use this netbook almost exclusively for browsing and Firefox runs constantly with average 5 or 6 tabs and sometimes anything up to 20 if I spot a load of things in the register email I think may be interesting as I open each in a new tab and keep looking through the email.

It is running a dozen or so add ons.

I rarely if ever shut it down except when security updates force it - I just use hibernate.

It has 1.5GB of memory.

I have FF 3.5.2 and just checked usage - it was > 300MB. I imagine FF had been running several days. In the past it will have been running longer or sure as I've recently done an update on my AV which required a reboot.

Despite this I have never noticed any memory problem. After restarting FF with the same set of tabs active the usage has dropped to 150MB.

My conclusions -
There is probably a memory leak in FF 3.5.2
It seems it can run for ages on my low-end netbook without it mattering a damn.
It takes seconds to shut FF down and restart it which returns the unused memory.

If it ever causes me a problem I'd rather restart FireFox than use some other browser which can't run all those addons some of which I find very useful and others which I CBA to throw out even though I rarely if ever use them.

Mister_aaa

From here

Reduce memory usage when you minimise Firefox.
I have tried this before but it didn’t work until I have uninstalled all of the problematic extensions so I’m putting this as Step 3. Basically, this step will result in a sharp decrease in memory usage when you minimise Firefox’s window to the taskbar, and with a reduced memory usage when you maximise it again. Here are the steps:

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in “about:config” (without the inverted commas) and then press “Enter”.

2. “Right Click” in the page and select New -> Boolean.

3. In the box that pops up enter “config.trim_on_minimize” (without the inverted commas) and press “Enter”.

4. Select “True” and then press “Enter” again.

5. Restart Firefox.

6. Open several tabs and load some websites. Observe the memory usage before minimise and after minimise.

If you notice a sharp decrease in memory usage by Firefox after minimising, there you go, you’ve succeeded!

kwikbreaks

That really is quite magical.

Whether or not there is a real problem though is still open to debate imo as the high memory usage hasn't caused me any grief so far that I'm aware of.

DCFC79

kwikbreaks wrote: »

That really is quite magical.

Whether or not there is a real problem though is still open to debate imo as the high memory usage hasn't caused me any grief so far that I'm aware of.

it wasnt causing me any grief as such, i was just worried about the high memory usage, ill add adblock and see if it has an effect and ill also do the about:config thing as well

[Deleted User]

kwikbreaks wrote: »

That really is quite magical.

Whether or not there is a real problem though is still open to debate imo as the high memory usage hasn't caused me any grief so far that I'm aware of.

It's quite a simple change that just allows Windows to swap the memory Firefox is utilising from RAM to the pagefile when it's minimised, which has the drawback that it will incur a slight delay when it's restored.

If Firefox's memory usage isn't causing you any problems, then it's probably best to leave that setting as it is.