firefox eating 480 MB of memory?

[akramh]

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..

 

[zigzag3143]

mem leak in FF

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

 

[akramh]

no I don't want to slow down firefox

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?

 

[zigzag3143]

firefox

no I don't want to slow down firefox

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

 

[SIW2]

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

 

[zigzag3143]

FireFox

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

View attachment 17136

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

 

[pop pop]

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.

 

[swarfega]

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

 

[spliff]

See anything out of the normal please comment:

 

[swarfega]

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

 

[dkh2]

I have no plugins and firefox exe only uses 35 mgs with one window and 70 with 4 windows open

 

[akramh]

I think I was using a lot of plug-ins when I took that screeny, like noscript, flash, flashblock, addblock plus, xmark and auto pager.

now I moved to 7264 x64, and running Minefield 3.0.10 which is the 64-bit firefox project mozilla are working on , so far so good. just running noscript, xmark plug-ins atm. here is a screeny of process memory usage:

so it's seems to be taking 130 MB, thats with 5 tabs open at the same time..

 

[FXDriverGuy]

Firefox 3.5 is unusually bug-ridden but most memory problems can be attributed to the Flash plugin. So I believe everyone should start blaming Adobe and not Mozilla.

Flash can and will eat up huge amounts of memory and CPU. You can witness this in Chrome which runs the plugin in a separate process. In Chrome you can just kill this process and everything goes back to normal. In Firefox, for now, you have no other option but to restart the browser.

 

[zigzag3143]

Firefox memory

I think I was using a lot of plug-ins when I took that screeny, like noscript, flash, flashblock, addblock plus, xmark and auto pager.

now I moved to 7264 x64, and running Minefield 3.0.10 which is the 64-bit firefox project mozilla are working on , so far so good. just running noscript, xmark plug-ins atm. here is a screeny of process memory usage:
View attachment 17289
so it's seems to be taking 130 MB, thats with 5 tabs open at the same time..

I know firefox has a memory problem but frankly at 1 gig I cared at 4 I dont. cpu stayed the same and it seems like the memory leak slows down at abt 500 megs. I do run alot of plugins and leave alot of windows open but thats what its there for.

Ken

 

[pestbest]

I don't think it's related to Plugins. I have only WOT and ABP together with the Norton Toolbar. My firefox takes up 150MB of RAM and that's a lot considering I have only 1 GB of RAM.

Thanks for the information you gave me. From now on, If your going to run a resource hog, it would be best to first shut down your FF. Anyway, can anyone please inform the FF Devs about this?

 

[akramh]

hmmm this is interesting what you said about the flash plug-in, so far I don't use flash with minefield x64 since it's not compatabile, and have added most of my usuall add-ons and memory usage now is very small, usually below 100 Megs ( currently 80 Megs with 1 tab only ). they said you can't run add-ons well with minefield x64 but so far the only add-on that doesn't run for me is adobe flash.

 

[swarfega]

Im intriqued as to how you managed to install 32-bit addons on a 64-bit browser as theyre not compatible.

 

[Dinesh]

Hi all, its for those whose firefox is eating RAM in lunch, 5 Tips To Reduce Firefox Memory and Cache Usage

 

[Ezura]

but.....

I have very similar problem with Firefox.

I'm currently using Firefox 3.6 (nothing much different at first except last couple of week the problem starts). But the second problem is when ever I close the Firefox, the Windows freezes right after the closing. I'm using Windows 7 64-bits. Also most of the time it occurs when the bar on top (the the name of application name is) suddenly turns to light blue color. Everything is working fine, as soon I close it, it freezes the Windows

 

[Not Myself]

Reducing memory usage - Firefox - MozillaZine Knowledge Base