firefox4 memory eating monstrus

Used firefox4 entire day (for a change) and opened top.




I've seen posts on forum mentioning Firefox being memory hungry, but I never noticed significant difference between Firefox and Opera.

~2GB ram, what the heck is firefox using it for?
 
Mine is using 400-500 MB after a day and I thought this was a lot, but 2 GB is just ridiculous.
Do you use a lot of addons?
 
I use 7 addons:
  • Adblock Plus
  • Element hiding helper for Adblock plus
  • Firebug
  • firecookie
  • Scripthis
  • Stylish
  • Download Statusbar
 
ahh, Now I remember, I selected optimizations when installing port.... there was warning about firefox eating lots of memory with that option :D
 
But the CPU time looks huge too. I've been using Opera for as long as your screenshot's uptime and it's been running for less than 8 minutes.
 
Alt said:
I think they are not handled yet all of FF memory leaks

An urban myth dating back to pre-version 2.5 days. Any memory leaks in FF that a user would notice were solved by then. Memory issues nowadays are related to add-ons by 3rd parties.

I typically run with around 5 tabs and never close the browser for days on end. Memory usage is always between 200-300Mb for FF4.

Of all the friends/family/business users who rely on me for tech support, no one is any different than what I have. Now that's on Windows. I do not have FF4 on my FreeBSD boxes yet.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
An urban myth dating back to pre-version 2.5 days.
Release 3.0 patch notes: http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/3.0/releasenotes/
Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.
You think they caught all of leaks ?
 
Mr ignorance, this is from FF official patch notes not from any module.

I'm not talking about extensions at all. If we count extensions - this is not hundreds of leaks -- it case "with modules" I don't know such big numbers (kidding).

If you want holy war about FF say please, I will leave then. But killasmurf86 started topic about 2GB memory consumption, not about your personal preferences/like/dislike (I use FF too under FreeBSD).
 
Last time I used Firefox (3.0.something, about two years ago) it was taking a GB of memory after a day of usage even without any third party addons or plugins installed...
 
Sure killasmurf86 uses many addons (normally I use 2 of them), so it just eating memory faster than usual =) I think it's no other way to debug - just disable them one by one.
 
Alt said:
Sure killasmurf86 uses many addons (normally i use 2 of them), so it just eating mem faster than usually =) I think its no other way to debug - just disable them 1by1

I wouldn't call that many, especially for browser that is being advertised as most extendable (with extensions)
 
I find that every time I click within the web component windows in firefox, my hard drive churns a bit. This isn't ideal for my poor little hard drive.

Also, I had my suspicions that Firefox was memory leaking but didn't want to say anything until others noticed a similar issue.
 
kpedersen said:
I find that every time I click within the web component windows in firefox, my hard drive churns a bit. This isn't ideal for my poor little hard drive.
If the files it's trying to access are stored in the user profile, try moving the profile to a memory disk, if the memory size allows it of course. You can make a script that populates the appropriate directories every time before running the browser.
 
I have a ton of extensions installed and running in FF 3.6, which currently has 24 tabs open, and it's using 540MB ram in Windows.

I normally open FF once on boot and never close it. This instance has been running for around 10 days.
 
kpedersen said:
Also, I had my suspicions that Firefox was memory leaking but didn't want to say anything until others noticed a similar issue.

Again, not that you'd notice. It's been a while since I've looked at this issue so I dialed up Asa Dotzler to see if anything's different.

No. Nothing is different than what I said. Users won't notice memory leaks. All browsers have them (of course) but the only significant problem FF has is with GMail. I had heard of this some time ago. GMail does a lot of fancy stuff with javascript but I don't recall what the core of the problem Firefox has with it.
 
I wonder if the bigger culprit is flash, at least for me.
Code:
killall npviewer.bin
seems to reclaim most of the memory they'd been hoarding.
 
qsecofr said:
I wonder if the bigger culprit is flash, at least for me.
Code:
killall npviewer.bin
seems to reclaim most of the memory they'd been hoarding.

Not for me.
I don't use Flash at all (In fact, I don't even use Linux compat at all)
 
drhowarddrfine said:
An urban myth dating back to pre-version 2.5 days. Any memory leaks in FF that a user would notice were solved by then. Memory issues nowadays are related to add-ons by 3rd parties.

Firefox, by design highly encourages usage of 3rd party add-ons/extensions.
Furthermore, firefox apparently allows these extensions to cause memory leaks.

Isn't it fair to say this is a problem with firefox itself?
 
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