Windows 7: firefox eating 480 MB of memory?

was looking at the task manager and it was kind of shocking to see firefox eating up 500MB of memory.. does that mean something could be wrong? I noticed sometimes when I am typing there is a delay for letters to appear, maybe that's a bad sign.... here is a picy attached!

I only have 2 tabs open at the moment, both pointing to seven forums. could it be cashe settings? I think I was playing around with the cash settings recently but don't remember if it was disk cashe or memory cashe...

I'm using firefox v3.0.11, since I had some issues with v3.5 like not being able to drag & drop URLs to the bookmark toolbar..



as I type these words, again there is a delay when I type letters..

I have seen that in both 3.0 and to a lesser extent in 3.5. IM using 3.5 and FF is using 215MB.You can lower the cache but that will slw down FF do you want to do that?


Ken

no I don't want to slow down firefox :P

just closed firefox and checked the task manager, it took 20 seconds for firefox to fully close and disapear from the task manager then started it again, it imediatly took 50MB of memory, and now after 10 minuts of browsing it's taking 75MB which is OK.

considering your firefox is taking 200MB then you were not really that far behind me! I will watch and see what happens, btw when it was at 500MB I haven't restarted firefox for a long time as I was surfing other sites so maybe that has something to do with it... but when you close those sites isn't it supposed to free that memory?

Firefox doesnt release the mem till all windows are closed. I hade 10 windows open and it was using 440mb, I closed all but 1 and it only went done to 300. I regularly restart FF

Ken

Sounds like a lot I have 4 tabs open and it is at 61mb :

Maybe its which tabs are open. Im running 4 SF tabs and i at 200+megs
K

As good as Firefox is, and as good as the Mozilla folks are, This is one dragon they have never slayed. Firefox has had a memory leak since inception. They have never fixed it. One tab open or many, doesn't matter. Leak, leak, leak. I have posted a ton about this in other forums.

Take an ordinary machine...my wife's...a Celeron running XP Pro with 512 Gb of RAM. OPen Firefox to a single page...Yahoo. Wait. It eats some RAM. Wait some more and it eats more. Eventually, it takes all the RAM and crashes itself or the machine or both. I've watched this happen. Granted, it takes a couple of days, but it will act like a flesh eating bacteria and consume everything including itself.

To me, that's a BIG problem. Working in software myself I know memory management can be a bear. But this is bad...and has been forever.

Do you have lots of plugins installed? Each one of those will use up memory.

See anything out of the normal please comment:

firefox is only using 120mb which is quite reasonable. Apart from that I see nothing unusual in that screenshot.